Once I wrote it all down and actually assigned some variable names I realised that i needed something to tick over every time it tried all the letters.  I remember "clock" functions doing these (well, mod).

I designed a little loop to "tick" over every time the end letter went through it's 26 letters.  For that you need to establish if the last letter is multiples of 26 (straight calculation of how many iterations we are up to, "counter" with the number of letters)  with the char from the end, you need to see the whole number (counter/26^1) which is 0 until 27 and then it's 1.  1%26 = 1. so that would tick over the second char to the char(97) + 1. - complex to exmplain so here's my code ...

I'm quite the captain chuffy at the moment  ... (if you couldn't tell!)

Now, back to the "real learning" ...

Brad

int findPassWord(string actualPassWord)

{

clock_t startTime;

startTime = clock ();

int pwLength = actualPassWord.length();

string userPassWord(actualPassWord);

char* pw ;

pw = (char* )malloc(pwLength+1); //allocate the amount of memory needed by pw

//initialise the pw to all 'a's.

for (int j = 0; j < pwLength; j++) {pw[j] = char(97);}

int numPossibleChars = 26; //(a-z)

for (int counter = 0; counter < pow(numPossibleChars,pwLength); counter++)

{

// step through each char in the pasword and set it based on where we are with the coutner

for (int i = 0; i < pwLength; i++)

{

/* below is a term "counter/pow(numPossibleChars,i)%numPossibleChars" which will cycle through all chars needed (a-z for example) and then at multiples of 26, will increment the next one by 1). */

pw[i] = (char)(97+((int)(counter/pow(numPossibleChars,i))%numPossibleChars));

if (pw==userPassWord)

{

cout << "Hey Buddy, you guessed my password ... \"" << pw << "\" in " << (clock() - startTime)/1000 << " seconds" << endl;

return 0;    // is there a better way of returning??

}

}

}

free(pw);

cout << "Program Failed to get password" << endl;

return 0;

}