john the ripper rules

First things first.
This is not meant as a cracking question, its meant as a hacking question.
Can someone please tell me how do I get a password, if for example I know for sure that a particular character appears or not and also another character I know appears in say, 4th position.

EDIT: get password from the /etc/shadow file

#1. What are the meanings of "cracking" and "hacking" in your post?
#2. Get a password from where?

Hacking or cracking call it what you want. Trying to obtain someone else’s password by searching a stream or files is malicious and neither LQ nor its users will help you with your endeavor.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

* Posts containing information about cracking, piracy, warez, fraud or any topic that could be damaging to either LinuxQuestions.org or any third party will be immediately removed.

Originally Posted by reverse #1. What are the meanings of "cracking" and "hacking" in your post? #2. Get a password from where?

Cracking means stealing someone else's password for malicious reasons or doing something to harm others. Hacking means exploring everything.
Now I call this hacking because I will know how much time does it take for my password to be cracked by testing it out myself. Just to weigh my chances of being secure if someone might be doing shoulder browsing. And I just want to explore everything. That's it.

Originally Posted by crabboy Hacking or cracking call it what you want. Trying to obtain someone else’s password by searching a stream or files is malicious and neither LQ nor its users will help you with your endeavor. http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php * Posts containing information about cracking, piracy, warez, fraud or any topic that could be damaging to either LinuxQuestions.org or any third party will be immediately removed.

Thanks anyway.I will search for it somewhere else and also post it for others benefit so that they will understand the risk of letting others know even a single letter of their password.

Not that there aren't other forums on this small www.
Only that people here are sensible and understanding.

Thank you

Heres a vote for cad. Hacking and Cracking are NOT the same thing.

If you are entering a system to do something malicious, that is cracking. If hacking is the same thing, sue Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Dogpile, Macintosh, any given Government. Have fun!

This is NOT going to turn into a hacking/cracking flame. There are plenty of threads on this forum already debating that. Stealing passwords is stealing passwords there is no hack or crack about it. Cad, if you were attempting to find out how things work, he went about it the wrong way. Your first post was very vague about pattern matching passwords and you gave no indication about where and how you were obtaining these passwords. We see plenty of kids trying to get their hands on malicious programs and scripts and LQ will play no part in it.

Ok John the Ripper does not come with man or info pages, so I will help you get to the docs (though of course there is probably something online).

locate johntheripper | grep OPTIONS

or

john

EXAMPLES has a lot of examples

--rules is probably what you are after in-conjunction with a filtered word list.

http://sectools.org/crackers.html

It is a bit odd how cracking has become to mean something illegal/immoral, really cracking is the breaking of secured data, hacking is the use of technology beyond the creator's intended purpose.

Originally Posted by Zention It is a bit odd how cracking has become to mean something illegal/immoral, really cracking is the breaking of secured data, hacking is the use of technology beyond the creator's intended purpose.

I think what crabboy is getting at is cad's apparent intentions. I don't think his concern is a debate on the terminology of hacking vs. cracking. The way cad conveyed his information (or lack of) maybe gave crabboy an indication that he was maybe up to no good?

I'm closing this thread, for reasons already stated by crabboy in post #3.

If you have any questions regarding this closure, please contact me via email.