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Hashcat is designed for extreme speed. To maintain that speed, it maps files directly. Because a compressed file must be mathematically "unpacked" before the strings can be read, Hashcat cannot perform its usual optimizations on a .gz or .zip file directly. Use the standard input ( stdin ) pipe. How to Run Hashcat with Compressed Wordlists
Alex wondered, "Can Hashcat read these files without me having to unpack them first?" The Discovery
: Hashcat decompresses the data in memory on the fly. Usually, your GPU is the bottleneck, not the CPU decompression, so you won't see a performance drop. How to Do It (The 10-Second Guide)