John the Ripper source code is distributed in the form of tarballs (tar archives) compressed with gzip, xz, or (for older versions) bzip2. On a Unix-like system with GNU tar (or on Cygwin if you use Windows), please use the following command for gzip-compressed tarballs:
tar xzvf john-VERSION.tar.gz
(where VERSION is a John the Ripper version number, such as 1.8.0). For xz-compressed tarballs use (note the uppercase “J”):
tar xJvf john-VERSION.tar.xz
For bzip2-compressed tarballs use (note the lowercase “j”):
tar xjvf john-VERSION.tar.bz2
On some commercial Unices, you might need to download and install gzip or xz or bzip2 on your own (perhaps from a pre-compiled freeware archive for your flavor of Unix) and/or to use more complicated command-line syntax, such as:
gzip -dc john-VERSION.tar.gz | tar xvf -
Please refer to man (manual) pages, texinfo documentation, and/or web pages on tar, gzip, xz, and bzip2 for information on the command-line options.
To apply a contributed patch that was generated in accordance with our conventions and compressed with gzip, on a Unix-like system with GNU software (or on Cygwin), please use the following commands (assuming that you have just extracted the source code from a tarball as shown above):
cd john-VERSION gzip -dc ../john-VERSION-WHAT-REVISION.diff.gz | patch -p1
(where VERSION, WHAT, and REVISION are parts of the patch file name).
Please note that you must not enter the src subdirectory prior to applying patches generated in accordance with our conventions.
To apply an uncompressed patch, use:
patch -p1 < ../john-VERSION-WHAT-REVISION.diff
The option is letter p followed by digit 1 (one), meaning to strip one leading directory name (the top-level directory for our source tree) from pathnames specified in the patch file.
Please refer to the man (manual) page and/or texinfo documentation on your version of the patch program for information on the command-line options.