Another JtR pipe to aircrack question (character setting and max length issues)

[Jessedestructo]

Greetings all.
I would just like to open with a thank you to all contributors on this board. I obviously have not been registered very long, but I have been using the resources here for sometime.

I am using BT 5 R2 Gnome 64-bit booting from a live cd.

I was able to get JtR to run in incremental mode and I was also able to get it piped into aircrack-ng ... After about 10 hours aircrack shutdown and stated the password was not found. I did some research and obviously figured out that incremental mode has a max. of 8 characters. I went into John.conf and changed the values the section;
# Incremental Mode
[Incremental:All]
File=$JOHN/all.char
MinLen=8 <b>(it was set to 0)</b>
MaxLen=20 <b>(it was set to 8)</b>

After doing that I ran this command;
John --incremental:ALL --stdout | aircrack-ng -b 00:00:00:00:00:00 -w - wifihandshake.cap

Then it acted as if aircrack was going to open but instead displayed;

Quitting aircrack-ng...

My question is what did I do wrong? I know there are lots of topics on JtR piping issues, but none of the ones I have found really break it down.

My second question is; Does JtR use both CAPs and lowercase letters when running incremental mode? I know most routers these days are case sensitive.

And my question is; id JtR does not run through both lower and uppercase letters for this type of process, then I would like to define my own custom character set or edit and existing character set to gear it more towards wpa/wpa2 cracking... where might I find a decent tutorial that explains that? I have found lots of info on this, but nothing that is a step by step breakdown.

Anyways pardon my newbism and thank you in advance for any help you may provide.

[sostentado]

i think i've encountered this also..please corrent me if im wrong on this:
try to

cd to the source directory of JTR and then run your command on the same directory but remember to copy your .cap file there.