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crunch -d option with simple aA charset Ask Question

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Asked 1 year, 4 months ago Active 1 year, 4 months ago Viewed 642 times
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Users Sorry if this is simple, but I can't find any answer to what should be an easy question.
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Unanswered I am simply passing the command to crunch:

0 Podcast 296: Adventures in
Jobs Javascriptlandia
$ crunch 3 3 aA -d 1@
The Loop: A community health indicator

I would expect crunch to generate strings with 3 characters while limiting the same number of lower Featured on Meta
Bycase
usingletter
our site, youaAA
to 1: acknowledge that, you
, AaA , AAa AAAhave read andmy
. However, understand our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Service.
output is:
New Feature: Table Support

Crunch will now generate the following number of lines: 2 Swag is coming back!
aAa
AaA

I tried to set -d 1@ -d 3, to keep my upper case letters, but I get the same results. What am I
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understanding wrong here?
0 Insert letter or number with crunch -t flag
Thanks a lot for your reply,
0 How to generate a Password Dictionary by
Regex?
linux bash kali-linux

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share improve this question follow asked Jul 29 '19 at 12:44
Léon André 16 Is there a US International keyboard layout
1
on Linux that mimics Windows' behavior?

add a comment 3 Why less -F option does not work with -S

option

1 Answer Active Oldest Votes 0 crunch - @%,^ appearing at most 3 times

2 Physical disk space consumed by a file and

its name
What am I understanding wrong here?
1 How to use crunch to generate a 8 char
0 uppercase alphanumeric wordlist
crunch doesn't work like this and the manual is somewhat misleading. Its logic makes sense once Crunch: using -d 1, -d 1% options with first
3
you get it; and to get it you need examples (available in the manual), trials and errors. two chars DD

0 Sending correct escape sequences in

Or this answer maybe. :)
terminal

From the manual: 0 Insert letter or number with crunch -t flag

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crunch <min-len> <max-len> [<charset string>] [options]
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You may specify character sets for crunch to use on the command line or if you leave it
blank crunch will use the default character sets. The order MUST BE lower case How massive can a starship be without becoming
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characters, upper case characters, numbers, and then symbols. If you don't follow this
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Where the manual says "lower case characters", "upper case characters", "numbers", and
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the manual uses, respectively, but aside from this "lower case characters" is just an abstract "set things you are doing for them?
1". In this context @ refers to "set 1" and % refers to "set 3". The tool doesn't check if "set 1" or Would this be considered racist?
"lower case characters" are indeed lower case characters!
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The output is Why don't opaque objects reflect light?

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because crunch by default uses "lower case characters" only. If we explicitly tell it to use catastrophes at the end of the war
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crunch 1 1 aA bB cC dD -t % Why did Peter the Great change his daughters'

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then it will use the third set of symbols:
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Question feed

Your original command

crunch 3 3 aA -d 1@

specifies aA as "lower case characters" set. Yes, you did tell crunch that A was a "lower case
character". Now -d :

-d numbersymbol
Limits the number of duplicate characters. -d 2@ limits the lower case alphabet to output
like aab and aac . aaa would not be generated as that is 3 consecutive letters of a . The
format is number then symbol where number is the maximum number of consecutive
characters and symbol is the symbol of the the character set you want to limit i.e. @,%^
[…]

So you told crunch that any "lower case character" (from your set, i.e. a or A ) can appear at
most 1 time in a row. And indeed the output you got contains neither aa nor AA .

Sometimes it's useful to forget about "lower case characters" etc., to think in terms of "set N"
instead. The manual seems to be fixed on the premise that "lower case characters" should all be
lower case and so on. Still (at least in Ubuntu) there is a file /usr/share/crunch/charset.lst which
can be used with -f ; it defines various sets that mix the four basic sets or their fragments. This
strongly suggests any set acting as "lower case characters" (or "symbols", or …) is silently
supported.

So if you need to generate strings so the first character is a , 0 or ( and the second character is
a , 1 or ) , then this is the way to go:

crunch 2 2 'a0(' 'a1)' -t @,

Try it. Notice aa appears in the output, but it's neither " a from the first set twice", nor " a from the
second set twice". The pattern @, guarantees the first a is from the first set and the second a is
from the second set. However this distinction is not so strict when -d is involved. The command

crunch 2 2 'a0(' 'a1)' -t @, -d 1@

will not generate aa . This observation leads to the following trick:

crunch 3 3 aA a -d 1,

The output is:

aAa
aAA
AaA
AAa
AAA

which is almost what you wanted. The mechanism seems to be like this:

1. There is no -t , so the tool uses the first set only.

2. It generates all possible outputs (like crunch 3 3 aA ).
3. It discards lines that contradict -d 1, . This option says there cannot be aa in the output. It
doesn't matter the option refers to the second set and all the output comes from the first set.
No aa . Period.

You didn't anticipate aAa because you misinterpreted -d 1@ as "limiting the number of duplicates",
while it's "limiting the number of consecutive duplicates".

Finally note the answer is mostly based on observation rather than the documentation. In particular
the trick seems undocumented, it may be just an accidental result of how crunch works under the
hood. Future upgrades may make the tool behave differently in this matter without breaking
documented features.

share improve this answer follow answered Jul 29 '19 at 23:47

Kamil Maciorowski
47.9k 22 83 128

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