There’s very similar case, where they specify tokens for the end and beginning (and even for the middle)
I guess it would be:
^1^abc
^1^cde
^2^987
^2^654
Etc.
Are you sure this format wont do something funky though? It's not even starting to count or crack after a while.
Provided you have a positional anchor (^x^) before every entry, then it will make no difference if you put every entry on its own line or you group all the entries in the same position together on the same line.
I have just created a test file which looks like this:
^1^1
^1^One
^2^2
^2^Two
^3^3
^3^Three
^4^4
^4^Four
And run with the argument
--min-tokens 4 and it spat out the exact 16 combinations I would expect it to. Similarly, I changed it to this:
^1^1 ^1^One
^2^2 ^2^Two
^3^3 ^3^Three
^4^4 ^4^Four
And it spat out the exact same 16 combinations. If your tokens file is not working there must be something else wrong with it.