> Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 18:15:08 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Dave Dittrich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > I'm not sure, though, that dd is the right place for this; perhaps it
> > would be better to have a separate tool? dd tends to suffer from the
> > kitchen-sink problem. Maybe it's better to put this into md5sum
> > instead?
>
> md5sum just reads stdin and checksums it. It doesn't have any of the
> other features of dd, like byte swapping, alternate output blocking
> for efficiently filling streaming media buffers, etc.
But if you add one simple options to md5sum to control the location of
the checksum output, and to make a copy to standard output, you can
get all the above. For example, you could do the following:
dd if=/big/input/device ibs=whatever |
md5sum -C checksum.txt |
dd of=/big/output/device obs=whatever
where '-C FOO' means "put a copy of the checksums in FOO and output a
copy of the input to standard output".
> Because of the acceptability requirement for the courts, it is most
> advantageous to get this into the official dd release, rather than a
> separate program that may not be widely used.
But GNU md5sum is just as widely used as GNU dd. And it seems to me
that a simpler program like GNU md5sum, dedicated entirely to the
problem of computing checksums accurately, is more likely to convince
a court than a more complicated program like GNU dd-with-checksums
would.
(My own beef with md5sum and shasum is that the checksum algorithm
should not be part of the program name; there should just be one
checksum program, with different algorithms as options. But that's a
different story...)
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