We may notice many download sites provide md5 string. For example, when I download ABC.zip, along with an md5 string like: “2743a6a9fe6f873df1c7ed8ac91df5d7 *ABC.zip”. I know the idea behind it, it’s Digest algorithm to prevent file forge.
My question is how a user calculates md5 string for the ABC.zip, and compare it with value site provides? Any existing tool to generate md5 string?
It depends a bit on your operating system ofcourse. Under most Linux/Unix distributions you have an md5 or md5sum program available.
Example:
# md5sum eclipse-SDK-3.6RC3-linux-gtk.tar.gz
8eca528d2c0b33dae10ba8750b2e4b94 eclipse-SDK-3.6RC3-linux-gtk.tar.gz
It also has a check mode which does exactly what you're looking for:
# md5sum -c test.md5
eclipse-SDK-3.6RC3-linux-gtk.tar.gz: OK
(test.md5 has the output of the previous command)