I don't know if there's already a way to do this but I've written a tiny python program to check md5sums. If people like it I'll probably expand it to sha1 as well.

Anybody got anything to say about this? If somebody thinks it's worth hosting I could make a binary for people who don't have python. Oh yeah if any noobs don't know how to run it here goes.
1. Open a text editor and copy the code into it.
2. Save it
3. Now either set it to run as an executable or go into a shell and type
"python /where/you/put/it"
4. Enter the filename with the directory if the file you want to check is not in the same directory. Press enter.
5. Enter the MD5 sum without the " program" bit. eg. "8d727ffc6ed3dd329ddbf787384f8a25". Press enter.
6. If they match you'll get "Sums OK" if they don't "Sums are not the same!" will be displayed.

None of you 43 people have anything to say about this! No better way to do it, or existing way to do it. Or whether it worked! Anything? Has anybody even tried it?

seems to work well. as its the i only md5 prog i know, i cant compare it but it seems good.well ill be using it so thanks and good job!

Thanks a lot ciyan I'll see what I can do about sha sums as well and post that later.

There is a program called CalcChecksum.

http://calcchecksum.sourceforge.net/

But theres always room for competition.

Ye but I think I'll keep this command line based so it's not directly competing

i heard python has md5 module you can use.

by the way, just think, try enter something like this "********; rm -rf /" instead of md5 sums, especially when you are root.

Oh yeah delete everything great idea qtbb!

I think he was pointing out your script is unsafe in it's present form. If you want others to use it you should add some checking to make sure, for example, the MD5 sum entered is in fact just an alphanumeric string.

why does that matter? It'll just fail

Because if someone entered what qtbb suggested whatever was entered after the semicolon could be executed.

Ye maybe. If I hadn't used raw_input which takes anything entered as a string.

Debian comes with "debsums"....works quite thoroughly.
Thanx for the lil script though....good backup.

http://www.zevils.com/cgi-bin/man/man2html?debsums+1