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I am using crunch to create a dictionary, which will contain all combinations for 8 characters. It stopped creating the dictionary after a while, because it requires 56 TB of space.

How can I fix this?

1 Answer 1

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Well. If you run it for all combinations of 8 characters, you'll get

(26 * 2) ^ 8 * 8 = 427677828251648

characters. That's approximately 389TB of space (uncompressed). You're trying to generate too large dictionary. To reduce that, you can

  • Limit the charset, or
  • length of the passwords

Alternatively, you can limit your problem (but not fix it) by

  • compressing it with -z option (that won't help nearly enough, as compressing random strings is not very efficient)
  • limiting duplicates with -d or -p options.
  • splitting your output to multiple files (see -o START)

Excerpts from man 1 crunch:

   -z gzip, bzip2, lzma, and 7z
          Compresses the output from the -o option.  Valid parameters are 
          gzip, bzip2, lzma, and 7z. gzip is the fastest but the compression 
          is minimal.  bzip2 is a little slower than gzip but has better 
          compression.  7z is slowest but has the best compression.

   -d numbersymbol
          Limits the number of duplicate characters.  -d 2@ limits the lower
          case alphabet to output like aab and aac.  aaa would not be 
          generated as that is 3 consecutive letters of a.  The format is 
          number then symbol where number is the maximum number of consecutive
          characters and symbol is the symbol of the  the  character  set
          you want to limit i.e. @,%^   See examples 17-19.


   -p charset OR -p word1 word2 ...
          Tells crunch to generate words that don't have repeating characters.
          By default crunch will generate a wordlist size of 
          #of_chars_in_charset ^ max_length.  This option  will  instead 
          generate  #of_chars_in_charset!.   The  !  stands for factorial.
          For example say the charset is abc and max length is 4..  Crunch 
          will by default generate 3^4 = 81 words.  This option will instead
          generate 3! = 3x2x1 = 6 words (abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba).
          THIS MUST BE  THE  LAST  OPTION!   This option CANNOT be used with
          -s and it ignores min and max length however you must still specify
          two numbers.

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