How to perform checksum on a file?

Answer:

You can use the md5sum or shasum commands.

Example

#md5sum test.txt

f1d41356dcabb8d8acefed069b22b0da  test.txt

#shasum test.txt

809970aec0109c5464dd36a3a9a5a9e79f838313  test.txt

md5sum is faster if you perform the command on a very large file, but shasum is more secure since the chance of two different files have the same checksum is smaller.

References:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_hash_functions

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