Symbolic link to binary, can't find configuration file

Question

I just installed the jumbo john package. it's in ~/tools/john the binary is ~/tools/john/run/john and the config is ~/tools/john/run/john.conf

I created a symbolic link with

sudo ln -s /home/me/tools/john/run/john /usr/local/bin/john

Now I get:

fopen: john.conf: No such file or directory

Am I doing this wrong? I'm in ubuntu 18.04.1 Thanks!

Answer 1

According to the CONFIG document in the doc subdirectory of the source distribution, the john.conf file is looked for in "John's home directory". A bit further on, a reference is made to a variable $JOHN, which I presume is an environment variable that will be use if it is set.

This is also mentioned slightly hidden (not properly marked up, in a parenthesis) half way down in the README.md file:

(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)

Therefore, it is fair to assume that the program is looking for the configuration file in the directory where the executable is located, or in $JOHN. You may want to set this variable to where the files for the program are located, e.g.

export JOHN="$HOME/tools/john/run"

This could be done for an individual user, or system-wide. See e.g. How to permanently set environmental variables