help with sha256

[h4sh]

Think it's quite basic question but I'm not a cracking expert, so I wanted to ask how to crack what I think it's sha256, so I issued

hashcat -m 1400 --force usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt Desktop/hash.txt

but after a while, it finishes with status "Exhausted" and does not crack...I read a little in the web and saw that "exhausted" means that hashcat finished number of tries for a given mask...but I didn't specified a mask and I know for sure that this hash is crackable with rockyou...Need help, thanks in advance

[plaverty9]

You used a wordlist instead of a mask. If it's exhausted, this means the password is not in the rockyou list. You can run rules on the rockyou wordlist, which might help. Do the same crack as you did before, but add a -r rules/<rulefile>

[plaverty9]

If you know what mask matches, or will crack it, you can add -a3 and then add the specific mask that you want to use, drop the rules and drop the wordlist.

[undeath]

Why are you using --force?