[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bob Proulx) wrote: > Olivier Delhomme wrote: >> Here I have coreutils 5.2.1, debian 3.1 unstable, bash 3.00.16(1) >> and I can not reproduce your problem. The hash value is correct and >> without the \ at the beginning. > > On my Debian system the md5sum utility is not the GNU one but is from > a different source and is included in the dpkg package. It is a > compatibility issue. As you note it does not behave this way. The > GNU md5sum is shipped on Debian as md5sum.textutils. In this > particular case bash is not involved. > > I can reproduce the behavior with the latest GNU md5sum 5.3.1. > However I also don't know why it is programed that way. It is > obviously intentional.
It is to inform `md5sum -c' that the file name is backslash-encoded. This is necessary to make md5sum work with file names containing newlines. For example: # Create a file containing a newline: $ touch 'a b' The `other' md5sum cannot deal with such a name: o $ /usr/bin/md5sum 'a b'|/usr/bin/md5sum -c /usr/bin/md5sum: can't open a /usr/bin/md5sum: no files checked [Exit 3] But the md5sum from coreutils can: $ /usr/bin/md5sum.textutils 'a b'|/usr/bin/md5sum.textutils -c a b: OK _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
