Calculating file checksums on an OS X system

If you need to calculate a checksum, aka cryptographic hash value or digital fingerprint, on a Mac OS X system, you can use the md5 command to calculate a MD5 checksum, which is equivalent to the md5sum utility on Linux systems, and the shasum command to calculate Secure Hash Algorithms (SHA). The default value for shasum, if no algorithm is specified, is Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1), but you can specify other algorithms, such as Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2), e.g. SHA-256, using the -a option. E.g. -a 256 for SHA-256.

Below is an example of hash values calculated with md5 and shasum on an executable file for WinSCP 5.11.1, a program for a Microsoft Windows system that I wanted to check on a MacBook Pro laptop running OS X El Capitan.

$ md5 ~/Documents/Temp/WinSCP-5.11.1-Setup.exe 
MD5 (/Users/jdoe/Documents/Temp/WinSCP-5.11.1-Setup.exe) = 7fb1fe6417216f427a44e6fa04595da3
$ shasum ~/Documents/Temp/WinSCP-5.11.1-Setup.exe 
dc978e7bf749d382fa4e10f1ad80c033bbaeb5af  /Users/jdoe/Documents/Temp/WinSCP-5.11.1-Setup.exe
$ shasum -a 256 ~/Documents/Temp/WinSCP-5.11.1-Setup.exe 
caffb74241517cd6be9f7372f792ec820fd9f40a2ea1541ee087a020418fcf3c  /Users/jdoe/Documents/Temp/WinSCP-5.11.1-Setup.exe
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You can see usage information for the shasum programm by typing shasum --help or checking the man page with man shasum.

$ shasum --help
Usage: shasum [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Print or check SHA checksums.
With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

  -a, --algorithm   1 (default), 224, 256, 384, 512, 512224, 512256
  -b, --binary      read in binary mode
  -c, --check       read SHA sums from the FILEs and check them
  -t, --text        read in text mode (default)
  -p, --portable    read in portable mode
                        produces same digest on Windows/Unix/Mac
  -0, --01          read in BITS mode
                        ASCII '0' interpreted as 0-bit,
                        ASCII '1' interpreted as 1-bit,
                        all other characters ignored

The following two options are useful only when verifying checksums:
  -s, --status      don't output anything, status code shows success
  -w, --warn        warn about improperly formatted checksum lines

  -h, --help        display this help and exit
  -v, --version     output version information and exit

When verifying SHA-512/224 or SHA-512/256 checksums, indicate the
algorithm explicitly using the -a option, e.g.

  shasum -a 512224 -c checksumfile

The sums are computed as described in FIPS-180-4.  When checking, the
input should be a former output of this program.  The default mode is to
print a line with checksum, a character indicating type (`*' for binary,
` ' for text, `?' for portable, `^' for BITS), and name for each FILE.

Report shasum bugs to mshelor@cpan.org
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