hi lenz,
It's not a bug - it seems like john spawns multiple tasks/threads to parallelize the search. If you want to kill multiple processes at once, try "killall". E.g., in your case you could have used "killall john", to regain control of your box. Alternatively you can try to determine the father process that forks the child processes - if you kill this one, it's childs should be terminated too.
killall did not work, and there was no father process which i could get my hands on, because every john just immediately spawned a new john and terminated. i think the reason, killall didn't work, was because this spawning happened too fast for killall. regards, michael balzer -- b&b computersysteme * kämperheide 10 * 58285 gevelsberg * germany fon +49 2333 913924 * fax +49 2333 913925 * http://www.bbcomp.de