progpick(1)

💖 progpick(1) — the manual, but make it make sense 💖

okay bestie, welcome to progpick, from the General Commands Manual. This is the page for the progpick command and honestly? it's lowkey iconic. Let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

progpick — bruteforce with a stream of permutations of a specific pattern

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

progpick [-vqc] [-e cmd] PATTERN

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So progpick is a program that generates permutations of a pattern you explicitly hand it. That's the whole vibe.

It's useful when you forgot some details about a passphrase but you still remember most of it — like, you know the shape of it, you just don't know which letter goes where. That's literally the exact situation this was built for. no cap 💅

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -v, --verbose — verbose logs, bestie. You can stack it (use it multiple times), and the maximum is 4. Yes, four. That's the ceiling. ✨
• -q, --quiet — do not print the progress bar. Just… no bar. Silence. peace. 🎀
• -c, --count — count the total number of permutations instead of printing them. It's giving "how many are there" energy, not "here's every single one" energy. 🔢
• -e cmd, --exec cmd — send the permutations to the stdin of a subprocess. Here's the important part, so pay attention: cmd is parsed into a list of arguments and then executed directly, instead of going through /bin/sh. What that means for you: shell quoting works, but other shell features don't. that's it, that's the deal 🙈
• -h, --help — prints help information. classic.

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🍓 EXAMPLES 🍓

Generate all combinations from a-z with a length of 5

progpick '{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}'

With progress bar

progpick '{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}' > /dev/null

Without progress bar

progpick -q '{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}{a..z}' > /dev/null

To make a character optional

progpick '{a..z}{{a..z},}'

From a-z and 0-9

progpick '{{a..z},{0..9}}'

Run a script for each result

progpick 'a{b,c{d,e{f,g}}}' | while read -r x; do
    ./script "$x"
done

Send the result to stdin of a script

progpick -e './script.sh' 'a{b,c{d,e{f,g}}}'

Attempt to open a luks partition

sudo progpick -e 'cryptsetup open --test-passphrase /dev/sdc1' 'a{b,c{d,e{f,g}}}'

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

This program was originally written and is currently maintained by kpcyrd. Bug reports and patches are welcome on github:

https://github.com/kpcyrd/progpick

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💀 reminder bestie: the -e cmd thing runs directly, not through /bin/sh. shell quoting = yes, other shell features = no. keep that in mind before you go feral with it.

anyway that's the whole page. go forth and brute-force responsibly 🌈👑

progpick(1) — dated 2026-05-03 — mwah, kiss the manual goodbye 💖✨