As the title of this recipe states, we will use a dictionary, that is, a list of words or possible passwords to crack previously obtained password hashes. Kali Linux includes several word lists in the /usr/share/wordlists/ directory. The one we will use in this recipe is RockYou, which comes by default compressed in GZIP format.

To uncompress the RockYou dictionary, we first need to go to the cd /usr/share/wordlists/ directory, then simply extract the archive contents using the gunzip command: gunzip rockyou.txt.gz. The next screenshot illustrates this process: