Hi, I did recently some research on available checksum tools on various platforms, and found its really a mess with all those different checksum outputs since there is no RFC which describes a standard format. Anyway, I think the most commonly used tools might be md5sum / sha1sum from GNU core utilities, and they are also user-friendly because they provide to validate directly from a checksum file without need for hacks with external tools (-c option). See also here where I have summarized what I've found so far: http://www.gknw.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=570 as you can see there I describe how the format of openssl's output only slightly differs from the md5 / sha1 tools (two blanks are missing). In addition I have already knocked at the door from coreutils, and got a positive reply that they are willing to support openssl's format too in order to make md5sum / sha1sum even more user-friendly - however before I proceed to look into that direction I thought I ask here first if there's willingness to fix the format of openssl (add the 2 blanks) and / or add an option -r (like the *BSD md5 / sha1 have) to output the checksum in the same format as md5sum / sha1sum use; this would make it *easily* possible to automatically verify openssl-generated checksums with md5sum / sha1sum. Please do not reply here with cool sed hacks - read my summarize and you see that I'm aware of such; think more of the users who are often not able to hack around with sed, pipes, whatever. I believe that even changing the existing format to be 100% identical with md5 / sha1 (which in turn md5sum / sha1sum can deal with) is not an issue of backward compatibility since openssl has no option to verify from checksum files AFAIK; and those who use sed hacks are certainly also able to skip the two additional blanks in future. current 'openssl md5' output: MD5(dummy.gz)= 085fb517d4e442564672c6dda5490ab7 md5 output (which can be used by md5sum): MD5 (dummy.gz) = 085fb517d4e442564672c6dda5490ab7
thanks, Günter. ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List openssl-dev@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
