md5 newbie question

[Chris Pressey]

On Sat, 06 Dec 2003 09:59:07 -0500
Marty Landman <MLandman at face2interface.com> wrote:

> Trying to verify a d/l before compiling:
> 
> Swami: md5 -s 466c63bb71b710d20a5c353df8c1a19c /tmp/httpd-2.0.48.tar.gz
> MD5 ("466c63bb71b710d20a5c353df8c1a19c") = 017b97dd023763b82a219bdfedd5cc29
> MD5 (/tmp/httpd-2.0.48.tar.gz) = 466c63bb71b710d20a5c353df8c1a19c
> Swami:

The "-s 466c63bb71b710d20a5c353df8c1a19c" part of your command is
requesting an md5 hash of the literal string of characters
"466c63bb71b710d20a5c353df8c1a19c".

That's almost certainly not what you want, and will only serve to
confuse.  Try running just this instead:

  md5 /tmp/httpd-2.0.48.tar.gz

and see "man md5" for more info.

> By eyeballing the first part of line1 against the second part of line
> 2 they appear equal so I guess my d/l's integrity is intact. What is
> the more automated way to do this though, so that I get a line at the
> end saying "ok" or "ah, phooey". Or am I supposed to extract and diff
> these myself?

Essentially, yes; many source tarballs come with an .md5 file which you
can diff against the output of the md5 command.

But FreeBSD's ports system will check md5's for you automatically.
The ports tree is very, very convenient, and I'd recommend using it
whenever possible.

-Chris