A Guide on Crunch Tool

Crunch is a wordlist generator where you can specify a standard character set or a character set you specify. Crunch can generate all possible combinations and permutations.

Features:

Crunch generates wordlists in both combination and permutation ways

It can breakup output by number of lines or file size

Resume support

Pattern now supports number and symbols

Pattern now supports upper and lower case characters separately

Adds a status report when generating multiple files

New -l option for literal support of @,%^

New -d option to limit duplicate characters see man file for details

Unicode support

The first command will generate a dictionary that contains minimum 3 character letters and maximum 4 by using default character sets. It will start from letters aaa and end with zzzz.

crunch 3 4 -o wordlist.3-4.txt

Now we’re going to create a wordlist with minimum 3 and maximum 4 strings and using the string “test” it will start with “ttt” and will end with “ssss”:

crunch 3 4 test –o test1.txt

Now let’s mix letters with numbers “test123” as the strings and use minimum 4 and maximum 5:

crunch 4 5 test1234 –o test2.txt

Using the man pages on crunch we can see how to create wordlists with different types of combinations from lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols:

Let’s create one with upper letters using the symbol “%%”:

crunch 6 6 test%% -o test-upper.txt

Create one with symbols with this command crunch 6 6 test^^ -o test-symbols.txt