Given a password with no idea how it was created, only knowing it's 4 letters
"Based upon the discussion in the class regarding how Unix system stores users’ name and password and performs the password-based access control, in this project, each student pretends to be a “hacker”. After the “hacker” (i.e. the student) obtains the file that contains users’ password in an encrypted format, named as pass.txt, the “hacker” (i.e. the student) is required to decrypt the password and write the decoded original password into another text file, named as plainpass.txt. Note that in this project, we assume user’s password consists of only 4 lower-case letters, which will reduce your searching space and expedite your program execution."
This was the only statement that I was given to crack this password, ended up going about it in a brute force matter using ASCII values.