Fast decompression speed. Highly compatible with Linux command-line utilities. Offers moderate file shrinkage.
Hashcat cannot decompress password-protected .zip files. All archives must be unencrypted. hashcat compressed wordlist
ZIP compression is widely supported and works reliably with Hashcat, provided you use the Deflate compression method. Users have reported that ZIP files compressed with software like 7-Zip v19.00 and WinRAR v5.50 work fine with Hashcat up to certain sizes – typically 1GB compressed files are known to work reliably. Fast decompression speed
# Compress zstd -19 -o wordlist.zst wordlist.txt Hashcat cannot decompress password-protected
Keep your frequently used, uncompressed wordlists on a fast NVMe SSD, and archive massive collections in .7z format on cheaper cold storage HDDs. If you want to fine-tune your setup, let me know: What hash type (e.g., MD5, bcrypt, WPA2) are you targeting? What GPU and CPU hardware are you running? How large is the compressed wordlist file ?
A single decompression stream is a bottleneck. If you have a 100GB wordlist compressed on a spinning HDD, the zcat process might feed Hashcat at 50 MB/s, but your RTX 4090 can process 100 GB/s worth of candidate rules.
To create a compressed wordlist from an existing text file: