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

On some commercial Unices, you might need to download and install gzip 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 xzvf -

Please refer to man (manual) pages on tar, gzip, and bzip2 for information on the command-line options.