---
title: Recover Your Lost Password On The Command Line
summary: >
  If you are like me and use many different passwords you may come to that point
  when you can't think of a password for a specific service (or (zip)file). This
  is how I recover most of them.
date: 2024-08-18T16:36:17+0200
#lastmod: 
categories:
- amateur-radio
- computerstuff
tags:
- pentest
- scripting
- john
- hashcat
- command-line
- draft_post

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---

I usually save most variations of my passwords in a secure file and with a rule
file I can re-create most of the passwords that I have ever used.

And because I do not want to type all the passwords by hand I use tools for this task,
which speeds this whole process up and it costs me minutes (where I can do other things
meanwhile)...

## Create the initial password file

I only use lower letters because I will punch that file through rules later that will
automatically make some letters uppercase, add some numbers to it et cetera...

~~~
password
otherpassword
~~~

Let these be our initial password file with the initial password that we use.

## The rule file

Now create a rule file that will do most of the work by modifying the lines
from our initial password file.

~~~
## take it as it is, toggle first character to uppercase or lowercase, uppercase all characters
:
T0
u

## append/prepend something to the password itself
$!
$1 $2 $3
$3 $2 $1
$m $i $n $e
^y ^m
^i
^i T1
^0
^0 T1
~~~

So if you tend to finish your weak passwords with `12shark`, you may want to add this to
your ruleset as `$1 $2 $s $h $a $r $k`.

Now every line from your password file gets appended with `12shark`.

## Line counts

~~~console
$ wc -l *
   154 list.best64.txt
 68196 list.d3ad0ne.txt
    24 list.simple.txt
     2 pwlist.txt
    15 simple.rule
~~~

So our initial password file contains 2 words (2 lines), the modified new password list
based on our own ruleset contains 24 lines (passwords).

And the other two files (_best64_ and _d3ad0ne_) were made with some default rules from a
tool called [john](https://www.openwall.com/john/).

As you can see the wide-known ruleset _best64_ created 154 passwords from it and the
more enhanced rule _d3ad0ne_ created 68196 passwords from our 2 words.

## What the output looks like

Using our own ruleset from above, we get these combinations:

~~~
password
Password
PASSWORD
password!
password123
password321
passwordmine
mypassword
ipassword
iPassword
0password
0Password
otherpassword
Otherpassword
OTHERPASSWORD
otherpassword!
otherpassword123
otherpassword321
otherpasswordmine
myotherpassword
iotherpassword
iOtherpassword
0otherpassword
0Otherpassword
~~~