Provided by: crunch_3.6-3_amd64 
NAME
crunch - generate wordlists from a character set
SYNOPSIS
crunch <min-len> <max-len> [<charset string>] [options]
DESCRIPTION
Crunch can create a wordlist based on criteria you specify. The output from crunch can be sent to the
screen, file, or to another program. The required parameters are:
min-len
The minimum length string you want crunch to start at. This option is required even for
parameters that won't use the value.
max-len
The maximum length string you want crunch to end at. This option is required even for parameters
that won't use the value.
charset string
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 characters, upper case
characters, numbers, and then symbols. If you don't follow this order you will not get the
results you want. You MUST specify either values for the character type or a plus sign. NOTE: If
you want to include the space character in your character set you must escape it using the \
character or enclose your character set in quotes i.e. "abc ". See the examples 3, 11, 12, and 13
for examples.
OPTIONS
-b number[type]
Specifies the size of the output file, only works if -o START is used, i.e.: 60MB The output
files will be in the format of starting letter-ending letter for example: ./crunch 4 5 -b 20mib -o
START will generate 4 files: aaaa-gvfed.txt, gvfee-ombqy.txt, ombqz-wcydt.txt, wcydu-zzzzz.txt
valid values for type are kb, mb, gb, kib, mib, and gib. The first three types are based on 1000
while the last three types are based on 1024. NOTE There is no space between the number and type.
For example 500mb is correct 500 mb is NOT correct.
-c number
Specifies the number of lines to write to output file, only works if -o START is used, i.e.: 60
The output files will be in the format of starting letter-ending letter for example: ./crunch 1 1
-f /pentest/password/crunch/charset.lst mixalpha-numeric-all-space -o START -c 60 will result in 2
files: a-7.txt and 8-\ .txt The reason for the slash in the second filename is the ending
character is space and ls has to escape it to print it. Yes you will need to put in the \ when
specifying the filename because the last character is a space.
-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. @,%^ See examples 17-19.
-e string
Specifies when crunch should stop early
-f /path/to/charset.lst charset-name
Specifies a character set from the charset.lst
-i Inverts the output so instead of aaa,aab,aac,aad, etc you get aaa,baa,caa,daa,aba,bba, etc
-l When you use the -t option this option tells crunch which symbols should be treated as literals. This
will allow you to use the placeholders as letters in the pattern. The -l option should be the
same length as the -t option. See example 15.
-m Merged with -p. Please use -p instead.
-o wordlist.txt
Specifies the file to write the output to, eg: wordlist.txt
-p charset OR -p word1 word2 ...
Tells crunch to generate words that don't have repeating characters. By default crunch will
generate a wordlist size of #of_chars_in_charset ^ max_length. This option will instead generate
#of_chars_in_charset!. The ! stands for factorial. For example say the charset is abc and max
length is 4.. Crunch will by default generate 3^4 = 81 words. This option will instead generate
3! = 3x2x1 = 6 words (abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba). THIS MUST BE THE LAST OPTION! This option
CANNOT be used with -s and it ignores min and max length however you must still specify two
numbers.
-q filename.txt
Tells crunch to read filename.txt and permute what is read. This is like the -p option except it
gets the input from filename.txt.
-r Tells crunch to resume generate words from where it left off. -r only works if you use -o. You must
use the same command as the original command used to generate the words. The only exception to
this is the -s option. If your original command used the -s option you MUST remove it before you
resume the session. Just add -r to the end of the original command.
-s startblock
Specifies a starting string, eg: 03god22fs
-t @,%^
Specifies a pattern, eg: @@god@@@@ where the only the @'s, ,'s, %'s, and ^'s will change.
@ will insert lower case characters
, will insert upper case characters
% will insert numbers
^ will insert symbols
-u
The -u option disables the printpercentage thread. This should be the last option.
-z gzip, bzip2, lzma, and 7z
Compresses the output from the -o option. Valid parameters are gzip, bzip2, lzma, and 7z.
gzip is the fastest but the compression is minimal. bzip2 is a little slower than gzip but has
better compression. 7z is slowest but has the best compression.
EXAMPLES
Example 1
crunch 1 8
crunch will display a wordlist that starts at a and ends at zzzzzzzz
Example 2
crunch 1 6 abcdefg
crunch will display a wordlist using the character set abcdefg that starts at a and ends at gggggg
Example 3
crunch 1 6 abcdefg\
there is a space at the end of the character string. In order for crunch to use the space you will need
to escape it using the \ character. In this example you could also put quotes around the letters and not
need the \, i.e. "abcdefg ". Crunch will display a wordlist using the character set abcdefg that starts
at a and ends at (6 spaces)
Example 4
crunch 1 8 -f charset.lst mixalpha-numeric-all-space -o wordlist.txt
crunch will use the mixalpha-numeric-all-space character set from charset.lst and will write the wordlist
to a file named wordlist.txt. The file will start with a and end with " "
Example 5
crunch 8 8 -f charset.lst mixalpha-numeric-all-space -o wordlist.txt -t @@dog@@@ -s cbdogaaa
crunch should generate a 8 character wordlist using the mixalpha-number-all-space character set from
charset.lst and will write the wordlist to a file named wordlist.txt. The file will start at cbdogaaa
and end at " dog "
Example 6
crunch 2 3 -f charset.lst ualpha -s BB
crunch with start generating a wordlist at BB and end with ZZZ. This is useful if you have to stop
generating a wordlist in the middle. Just do a tail wordlist.txt and set the -s parameter to the next
word in the sequence. Be sure to rename the original wordlist BEFORE you begin as crunch will overwrite
the existing wordlist.
Example 7
crunch 4 5 -p abc
The numbers aren't processed but are needed.
crunch will generate abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba.
Example 8
crunch 4 5 -p dog cat bird
The numbers aren't processed but are needed.
crunch will generate birdcatdog, birddogcat, catbirddog, catdogbird, dogbirdcat, dogcatbird.
Example 9
crunch 1 5 -o START -c 6000 -z bzip2
crunch will generate bzip2 compressed files with each file containing 6000 words. The filenames of the
compressed files will be first_word-last_word.txt.bz2
# time ./crunch 1 4 -o START -c 6000 -z gzip
real 0m2.729s
user 0m2.216s
sys 0m0.360s
# time ./crunch 1 4 -o START -c 6000 -z bzip2
real 0m3.414s
user 0m2.620s
sys 0m0.580s
# time ./crunch 1 4 -o START -c 6000 -z lzma
real 0m43.060s
user 0m9.965s
sys 0m32.634s
size filename
30K aaaa-aiwt.txt
12K aaaa-aiwt.txt.gz
3.8K aaaa-aiwt.txt.bz2
1.1K aaaa-aiwt.txt.lzma
Example 10
crunch 4 5 -b 20mib -o START
will generate 4 files: aaaa-gvfed.txt, gvfee-ombqy.txt, ombqz-wcydt.txt, wcydu-zzzzz.txt
the first three files are 20MBs (real power of 2 MegaBytes) and the last file is 11MB.
Example 11
crunch 3 3 abc + 123 !@# -t @%^
will generate a 3 character long word with a character as the first character, and number as the second
character, and a symbol for the third character. The order in which you specify the characters you want
is important. You must specify the order as lower case character, upper case character, number, and
symbol. If you aren't going to use a particular character set you use a plus sign as a placeholder. As
you can see I am not using the upper case character set so I am using the plus sign placeholder. The
above will start at a1! and end at c3#
Example 12
crunch 3 3 abc + 123 !@# -t ^%@
will generate 3 character words starting with !1a and ending with #3c
Example 13
crunch 4 4 + + 123 + -t %%@^
the plus sign (+) is a place holder so you can specify a character set for the character type. crunch
will use the default character set for the character type when crunch encounters a + (plus sign) on the
command line. You must either specify values for each character type or use the plus sign. I.E. if you
have two characters types you MUST either specify values for each type or use a plus sign. So in this
example the character sets will be:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
123
!@#$%^&*()-_+=~`[]{}|\:;"'<>,.?/
there is a space at the end of the above string
the output will start at 11a! and end at "33z ". The quotes show the space at the end of the string.
Example 14
crunch 5 5 -t ddd@@ -o j -p dog cat bird
any character other than one of the following: @,%^
is the placeholder for the words to permute. The @,%^ symbols have the same function as -t.
If you want to use @,%^ in your output you can use the -l option to specify which character you want
crunch to treat as a literal.
So the results are
birdcatdogaa
birdcatdogab
birdcatdogac
<skipped>
dogcatbirdzy
dogcatbirdzz
Example 15
crunch 7 7 -t p@ss,%^ -l a@aaaaa
crunch will now treat the @ symbol as a literal character and not replace the character with a uppercase
letter.
this will generate
p@ssA0!
p@ssA0@
p@ssA0#
p@ssA0$
<skipped>
p@ssZ9
Example 16
crunch 5 5 -s @4#S2 -t @%^,2 -e @8 Q2 -l @dddd -b 10KB -o START
crunch will generate 5 character strings starting with @4#S2 and ending at @8 Q2. The output will be
broken into 10KB sized files named for the files starting and ending strings.
Example 17
crunch 5 5 -d 2@ -t @@@%%
crunch will generate 5 character strings staring with aab00 and ending at zzy99. Notice that aaa and zzz
are not present.
Example 18
crunch 10 10 -t @@@^%%%%^^ -d 2@ -d 3% -b 20mb -o START
crunch will generate 10 character strings starting with aab!0001!! and ending at zzy 9998 The output
will be written to 20mb files.
Example 19
crunch 8 8 -d 2@
crunch will generate 8 characters that limit the same number of lower case characters to 2. Crunch will
start at aabaabaa and end at zzyzzyzz.
Example 20
crunch 4 4 -f unicode_test.lst japanese -t @@%% -l @xdd
crunch will load some Japanese characters from the unicode_test character set file. The output will
start at @日00 and end at @語99.
REDIRECTION
You can use crunch's output and pipe it into other programs. The two most popular programs to pipe
crunch into are: aircrack-ng and airolib-ng. The syntax is as follows:
crunch 2 4 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz | aircrack-ng /root/Mycapfile.cap -e MyESSID -w-
crunch 10 10 12345 --stdout | airolib-ng testdb -import passwd -
NOTES
1. Starting in version 2.6 crunch will display how much data is about to be generated. In 2.7 it will
also display how many lines will be generated. Crunch will now wait 3 seconds BEFORE it begins
generating data to give you time to press Ctrl-C to abort crunch if you find the values are too large for
your application.
2. I have added hex-lower (0123456789abcdef) and hex-upper (0123456789ABCDEF) to charset.lst.
3. Several people have requested that I add support for the space character to crunch. crunch has always
supported the space character on the command line and in the charset.lst. To add a space on the command
line you must escape it using the / character. See example 3 for the syntax. You may need to escape
other characters like ! or # depending on your operating system.
4. Starting in 2.7 if you are generating a file then every 10 seconds you will receive the % done.
5. Starting in 3.0 I had to change the -t * character to a , as the * is a reserved character. You could
still use it if you put a \ in front of the *. Yes it breaks crunch's syntax and I do my best to avoid
doing that, but in this instance it is easier to make the change for long term support.
6. Some output is missing. A file didn't get generated.
The mostly explanation is you ran out of disk space. If you have verified you have plenty of disk space
then the problem is most likely the filename begins with a period. In Linux filenames that begin with a
period are hidden. To view them do a ls -l .*
7. Crunch says The maximum and minimum length should be the same size as the pattern you specified,
however the length is set correctly.
This usually means your pattern contains a character that needs to be escaped. In bash you need to escape
the followings: &, *, space, \, (, ), |, ', ", ;, <, >.
The escape character in bash is a \. So a pattern that has a & and a * in it would look like this:
crunch 4 4 -t \&\*d@
An alternative to escaping characters is to wrap your string with quotes. For example:
crunch 4 4 -t "&*d@"
If you want to use the " in your pattern you will need to escape it like this: crunch 4 4 -t "&*\"@"
Please note that different terminals have different escape characters and probably have different
characters that will need escaping. Please check the manpage of your terminal for the escape characters
and characters that need escaping.
8. When using the -z 7z option, 7z does not delete the original file. You will have to delete those
files by hand.
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by bofh28@gmail.com
Crunch version 1.0 was written by mimayin@aciiid.ath.cx
all later versions of crunch have been updated by bofh28@gmail.com
FILES
None.
BUGS
If you find any please email bofh28 <bofh28@gmail.com> or post to http://www.backtrack-linux.org
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2009-2013 bofh28 <bofh28@gmail.com>
This file is a part of Crunch.
Crunch is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2 only of the License.
Crunch is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the
implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public
License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Crunch. If not, see
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
Version 3.6 May 2014 CRUNCH(1)