Title: John The Ripper setup Subject: hack your passwds John the ripper is a good cracking program that came after "CRACK". This is a summery of useful examples from the docs. First, try a wordlist (like the diconary for you ispell checker): john -w:words.lst passwd.1 john --wordfile=words.lst passwd.1 To continue cracking in the background. nice -n 20 john -w:words.lst -rules passwd.1 & To only crack accounts with a good shell john -w:words.lst -rules -shells:sh,csh,tcsh,bash passwd.1 To crack all the files you need cracked simultaneously: john -w:words.lst -rules passwd.* To try salts with two or more passwords faster, and then try the rest. Total cracking time about the same, but you get some passwords cracked earlier. john -w:words.lst -rules -salts:2 passwd.* john -w:words.lst -rules -salts:-2 passwd.* To try 26 different characters only, passwords from 'a' to 'zzzzzzzz': john -i:alpha passwd.1 The most powerful cracking mode in John is called "incremental" defined in ~/john.ini's [Incremental:All] section. use the full 95 character set, try all possible password lengths, from 0 to 8. john -i passwd.1 The default wordlist rules include ':' (which means "try words as they are in the list") as the first line. ############################### # The Config file: john.ini # ###############################