Re: md5sum

[Bob Proulx]

Mike Black wrote:
> md5sum would be a good thing to use to store checksums on files for forensics 
> and chain-of-evidence usage.
> So putting it in a pipe like from the SHADOW utils would be great to store 
> the validation sums for the tcpdump logs.

If in the future you would be so kind as to word wrap your messages at
some reasonable column such as 72 it would be most appreciated.

> But md5sum can't output to a file -- only to stdout.

But stdout is trivially redirected to files.  Perhaps you were unaware
of the shell's ability to redirect output?  Try this out.

  md5sum file1 file2 > output

> Perhaps we can add a -f/--file switch to store the sum?

Is there a circumstance where redirection of stdout to a file is not
possible?  This is the typical way to do things on unix-like operating
systems.

> Then we can tee any output to md5sum.

The 'tee' command as you mention also can redirect stdout to a file.

  md5sum file1 file2 | tee output

Hope that helps.

Bob