Question about the md5 files

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Question about the md5 files
started by: The Lightning Stalker

Posted by The Lightning Stalker on Feb. 12 2004,00:41

Just out of curiosity, what version of md5sum are you using to generate the md5's of the iso images? I noticed it doesn't have the * before the filename and this caused a temporary headache until I figured it out.

Thanks,
~
The Lightning Stalker

Posted by Del on Feb. 12 2004,04:45

* is the Bash wildcard character. It just means that John types 'md5sum damnsmall-0.5.3.1.iso', instead of 'md5sum *.1.iso' (for example). It's the same thing, but one takes more typing.

(John probably has the md5sum generation as part of a shell script anyway, and doesn't actually type it himself)

Posted by The Lightning Stalker on Feb. 24 2004,01:31

Well, when I went to read the md5 file with md5sum it needed the * to be there and when I created a md5 hash file of my own, md5sum put one in there automatically. Here is an example of the output of md5sum:

What I typed:
md5sum fmt.exe

What md5sum returned:
6c7190b8489a0ec565ede03089a7d347 *fmt.exe

See how it automatically puts the * before the filename even though that's not what I typed at the shell prompt? It's like the * is a delimiter that is a part of the output format for md5sum, but for some reason that's missing in the md5 files that come with distributions of DamnSmall. Just wondering what it was that way.

Thanks.

Posted by Del on Feb. 24 2004,04:40

Interesting. I've never had that come up when md5-ing. What system are you running it on? (Mine have always been on RedHat, Debian, and now DSL)