openwall / openwall/john

Support reading gzipped wordlists (and perhaps other things)

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enhancement
Dominant language
C
Stars
13.6k
Forks
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PR merge metrics
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Description

Whenever we do a (much needed) overhaul of wordlist.c, we should consider adding support for reading files compressed with gzip/xz (perhaps others - bzip?) on the fly. Perhaps using dlopen rather than requiring anything at build time.

If we do it cleverly enough (perhaps squeeze it into fgetl() if possible?) we could even support compressed input hash files.

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading wordlist.c and the fgetl() input path to understand how wordlists and hash files are read. Investigate whether optional gzip, xz, or bzip support through dlopen is feasible without build-time dependencies. Done would require a settled compression scope and working compressed-input support, but the issue does not define tests or a final design.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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