How to extract John the Ripper source code from tarballs

John the Ripper source code is distributed in the form of tarballs (tar archives) compressed with either gzip or 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 1.7.2). For bzip2-compressed tarballs use:

tar xjvf john-VERSION.tar.bz2