Re: Who "fixed" md5sum??

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2001 at 03:53:53PM -0700, Mark Paulus wrote:
>I have a question about md5sum.  It seems like in one of the not
>too distant releases of textutils, the md5sum program altered it's
>behaviour.  Before the change, it would act like the debian/linux
>variety, in that if you would do an 
>md5sum < <somefile>
>you would get a result, and that would be all, e.g.:
>
>This is the result from my debian box.....
>
>mgpaulus@testbox1:/smbapps/cygwin.pkg$ md5sum < setup.exe
>d91a97dcd67b7cb9c6aaa408cf431b01
>
>Here's the same result, except from my cygwin environment:
>$ md5sum < setup.exe
>d91a97dcd67b7cb9c6aaa408cf431b01 *-
>
>My problem is the little '*-' at the end...  I have several unix ported scripts 
>that run md5sum, and expect only the significant md5sum digits, and the
>trailing stuff is causing all the scripts to break.  Would it be possible
>to get either 
>1) a rational for adding the trailing stuff, and making it act
>differently than it's un*x cousin; 
>
>and/or 
>
>2) an ability to turn that "feature" off,
>if everyone else absolutely requires it??

md5sum on my linux box returns a '-' in the second column if the md5sum
is being performed on standard input.  I assume that you are using an
older version on your linux system if yours doesn't do that.

Inspecting the source, I see that the '*' means that the file is binary.

As to why these changes were introduced, you'd have to ask the authors
of textutils.

cgf

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