Re: Don't you think there are too many *sum utilities?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > Why not just: hashsum ALGORITHM [FILE]? A optional hashing
   > algorithm seems pointless for this.

   Because on decoding, 'hashsum -c FILE' could be made smart enough
   to auto-detect the algorithm based on the length of the hash, but
   only if the algorithm is optional (--md5) rather than required
   (md5).  Currently, md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, and sha512
   all produce different hash lengths, making this task unambiguous
   (but I'm not sure how long md4 is).

That might cause problems if in the future if there ever is a hashing
algorithm that is as long as say sha256, but produces something vastly
different.

   At any rate, since cksum is specified by POSIX, and since sum has a
   different output format, it is much harder to combine those two
   into a proposed hashsum than it is to join md5 and sha* sums.

Also, more importantly, who wants to implement this? :-)