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

[James Youngman]

On 4/8/07, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi, honourable coreutils developers.
>
> Current stable version of coreutils (6.9) has 8(!) utilities which
> somehow compute or/and check a message digest. They are: 'md5sum',
> 'sha1sum', 'sha224sum', 'sha256sum', 'sha384sum', 'sha512sum' and
> finally 'sum' and 'cksum'. It's already a little bit confusing and it
> seems that it isn't the endpoint yet. There is at least one more under
> discussion right now - 'md4sum'.

The sum, cksum and md5sum utilities are frequently used in scripts and
so those (at least) should IMO remain accessible under those names.
Perhaps we could install a unified binary whose behaviour depends on
the value of argv[0].

James.