Quick How-To: Check an MD5 Hash

MD5 hashes are popular in today’s computing, but many still don’t understand what purpose they serve, or how to generate one. Well, in simple terms, an MD5 hash can serve multiple purposes, such as the storing of passwords or checking the integrity of a newly downloaded file. This is very popular in the Linux world, but Windows and Mac OS X users alike can take full advantage of this extremely simple, but useful tool.

For those interested in finding out the few steps it takes to check the integrity of a file based on an MD5 Hash, you should check out a forum post I made last night, which puts everything into pretty simple terms. In this quick how-to, you can learn how to properly implement an MD5 checker in your Windows, and then proceed to generate a hash or compare one from a DIGEST file.

So if you think comparing an MD5 is difficult, check out the thread. It’s argued that GUI MD5 checkers are easier to use than the command-line application, but really, if you can type, it doesn’t get much easier than “md5sum filename“.

Source: How-To: Check an MD5 Hash