This is the community-enhanced, "jumbo" version of John the Ripper. It has a lot of code, documentation, and data contributed by jumbo developers and the user community. It is easy for new code to be added to jumbo, and the quality requirements are low, although lately we've started subjecting all contributions to quite some automated testing. This means that you get a lot of functionality that is not necessarily "mature", which in turn means that bugs in this code are to be expected.

John the Ripper homepage is:

https://www.openwall.com/john/

If you have any comments on this release or on JtR in general, please join the john-users mailing list and post in there:

https://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/

For contributions to John the Ripper jumbo, please use pull requests on GitHub:

https://github.com/openwall/john/blob/bleeding-jumbo/CONTRIBUTING.md

Included below is basic John the Ripper core documentation.

John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix, macOS, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS (the latter requires a contributed patch). Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt(3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos/AFS and Windows LM hashes, as well as DES-based tripcodes, plus hundreds of additional hashes and ciphers in "-jumbo" versions.

See INSTALL for information on installing John on your system.

To run John, you need to supply it with some password files and optionally specify a cracking mode, like this, using the default order of modes and assuming that "passwd" is a copy of your password file:

john passwd

or, to restrict it to the wordlist mode only, but permitting the use of word mangling rules:

john --wordlist=password.lst --rules passwd

Cracked passwords will be printed to the terminal and saved in the file called $JOHN/john.pot (in the documentation and in the configuration file for John, "$JOHN" refers to John's "home directory"; which directory it really is depends on how you installed John). The $JOHN/john.pot file is also used to not load password hashes that you already cracked when you run John the next time.