oe7drt-website/content/posts/2024/69-recover-your-lost-password-on-the-command-line/index.md

title	summary	date	lastmod	categories	tags	draft
Recover Your Lost Password On The Command Line		2024-07-27T09:43:37+02:00	2024-07-28T05:56:54+0000	amateur-radio computerstuff	draft_post	true

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 file (zip)).

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

$ 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.

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