> Why not just: hashsum ALGORITHM [FILE]? A optional hashing > algorithm seems pointless for this.
Because on decoding, 'hashsum -c FILE' could be made smart enough to auto-detect the algorithm based on the length of the hash, but only if the algorithm is optional (--md5) rather than required (md5). Currently, md5, sha1, sha224, sha256, sha384, and sha512 all produce different hash lengths, making this task unambiguous (but I'm not sure how long md4 is). That might cause problems if in the future if there ever is a hashing algorithm that is as long as say sha256, but produces something vastly different. At any rate, since cksum is specified by POSIX, and since sum has a different output format, it is much harder to combine those two into a proposed hashsum than it is to join md5 and sha* sums. Also, more importantly, who wants to implement this? :-) _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils