Quick Bash question(s)

[McVonstein]

Long time lurker, this may/may not be my first post here.

If I generated a text file in crunch and ran

sed '$!d' testdoc

(testdoc being my wordfile), it will display the last line in the wordfile. How can I load this into a bash variable like, say, $lastword.

Also, I'm having trouble with john reading from stdin from crunch's stdout. Can anyone show me the proper syntax? My last attempt looked like this:

#/pentest/passwords/crunch/crunch 1 4 | ./john --stdin --format=NT /home/jon/testhash.txt

I got many lines with "Error: no such instruction 'eaq'" going up incrementally

Thankyou, guys

[edit] I should say I was already in /usr/bin/ when I ran the above code

[Gitsnik]

Long time lurker, this may/may not be my first post here.

If I generated a text file in crunch and ran

sed '$!d' testdoc

(testdoc being my wordfile), it will display the last line in the wordfile. How can I load this into a bash variable like, say, $lastword.

Also, I'm having trouble with john reading from stdin from crunch's stdout. Can anyone show me the proper syntax? My last attempt looked like this:

#/pentest/passwords/crunch/crunch 1 4 | ./john --stdin --format=NT /home/jon/testhash.txt

I got many lines with "Error: no such instruction 'eaq'" going up incrementally

Thankyou, guys

[edit] I should say I was already in /usr/bin/ when I ran the above code

LASTWORD=`tail -n 1 testfile.txt`

What does crunch show you if you run it on its own (i.e. is it john printing the error, or is it crunch - probably john but just to be sure).

[McVonstein]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Crunch on its own just displays the selected output, i.e.

./crunch 1 3 a

would just display

a
aa
aaa

I'm fairly sure the problem is on john's side, or my inability to ever use pipes properly.

[Gitsnik]

Ok, probably is with john, try it with an echo statement (or maybe a "cat file.txt" where the file has your password in it) just to be sure the pipe works normally, as well as trying it with the wordlist rather than stdin.

Basically, we're just going through the motions to figure out if the error is across the board.

[McVonstein]

Odd...

I went and compiled both john and crunch on my laptop and put them into $PATH

The hashed password is 'test', and test.txt just contained the word 'test'

echo test | john --stdin --format=NT hash.txt

cat test.txt | john --stdin --format=NT hash.txt

The above worked fine. I ran

crunch 1 4 | john --stdin --format=NT hash.txt

again, and it worked fine!

When I got the error before, it was on an installed Backtrack 4 on my netbook. I'll see if I can reproduce the error on it in a few hours