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Easy Way to Generate MD5 of File or Folder


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I had found a very small and fast program to generate md5 files for files or folders a long time ago, discussed here - https://msfn.org/board/topic/162476-looking-for-a-vbs-script-to-generate-md5-of-a-file/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-1034865 - and mentioned here - https://msfn.org/board/topic/180747-possible-to-do-this-batch-without-using-a-temporary-file/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-1175225, but I couldn't remember where I got it. @jaclazhad found an extremely similar one, but its author was also unknown.

Well, I finally figured out where it came from. It is part of a distribution of hashutils - https://code.kliu.org/misc/hashutils/ - made and distributed by Kai Kliu -aka- code65536, so it can definitely be trusted. The version I was using was from hashutils-1.2.3-redist.7z, which is no longer posted on his site, while I assume the one that@jaclazfound was either from hashutils-1.2.4-redist.7z or hashutils-1.3.0-redist.7z, both of which ARE available and readily downloadable.

The components of the hashutils package are:

  • crc32sum.exe
  • md4sum.exe
  • md5sum.exe
  • sha1sum.exe
  • edksum.exe

All are available in both x86 and x64 versions (all included in the distribution), all of the utilities support recursive directory traversals with the -r switch, and all work on XP and above.

@jaclazdetermined that md5sum.exe was as fast as any other method that was found at the time, and I believe the other utilities should have the same level of performance.

Where this came from has been bugging me for over six years, so I figured I would pass this info along since I finally found it again. :) There are several other useful utilities available on his site, such as elevate, hidecon, vcopy, fontreg, the shell extensions ContextConsole -aka- Open Command Promptand HashCheck, among others, so look around and have fun! The two shell extensions mentioned are even open source, with source code available for download.

Cheers and Regards

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Yep. I was also impressed with vcopy:

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Why vcopy?

The primary benefit to using vcopy is that it preserves all timestamps and NTFS compression and encryption attributes, when possible. Normally, copy operations will fail to preserve any of the timestamps on directories and the creation and access timestamps on files. Especially in the case of directory timestamps, this default copy behavior wreaks havoc on people who depend on their files and directory trees having meaningful timestamps.

You can also suppress and strip out certain file attributes from being copied; for example, the read-only attribute when copying files from a CD-ROM.

Additionally, vcopy can compute hashes for files as they are being copied, eliminating the need for a wasteful second read pass.

Windows XP (or newer) is required for version 1.4.0 and newer; earlier versions are compatible with Windows 2000.

------------------------------------

Cheers and Regards

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Yep, I can confirm :thumbup vcopy (actually Verbatim copy, I knew it with this more descriptive name) is a very nice tool, useful in a number of situations.

As a side note - talking of copying files in a "proper" way - there is - generically speaking - a lack of tools capable of dealing with "sparse" files, or at least they are not easily findable. just in case I put together some of them (which I found "here and there" ) in a post on reboot.pro, here:

http://reboot.pro/topic/20487-any-tut-on-expanding-c-partition-on-many-ramdisk/?p=192898

jaclaz

 

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  • 4 months later...
On 1/2/2020 at 10:50 AM, bphlpt said:

I had found a very small and fast program to generate md5 files for files or folders a long time ago, discussed here - https://msfn.org/board/topic/162476-looking-for-a-vbs-script-to-generate-md5-of-a-file/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-1034865

 

Definitely fun stuff and brings back some memories as I read through here.  I notice I had to pull the files in the linked thread for the limitation of the attachment system on this forum, but brings to mind that I've been thinking about finding a way to post a lot of stuff like this I've done over the years (and perhaps source to go with it).  Probably not much demand, but been thinking either a linked blog to something like Dropbox.  Not sure how trying to post a bunch of small things like this on GitHub would fly, but can always figure out something to put some of this stuff back up.

Edited by Glenn9999
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