The documentation says: The default mode is to print a line with checksum, a character indicating type (`*' for binary, ` ' for text), and name for each FILE.
There are two problems here. First, a small one: the second character is a space character, which needs to be non-breaking, and preferably explained, as in "` ' (a space)". If you agree, I'll make a patch for the info and man page. Secondly, looking at the code, this isn't really what md5sum does. Rather, it prints '*' if in binary mode (--binary, or if O_BINARY is non-zero), and ' ' if in text mode (--text, or if O_BINARY is zero), but doesn't actually look at the file. It's not obvious to me why it's useful to output what mode md5sum is in (rather than doing some analysis of the file) but something needs changing here, whether it's behavior or documentation. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org
