At 14:33 -0400 2006/09/28, Leichter, Jerry wrote:
| VMS has for years had a simple CHECKSUM command, which had a variant, CHECKSUM/IMAGE, applicable only to executable image files. It knew enough about the syntax of executables to skip over irrelevant metadata like link date and time. (The checksums computed weren't cryptographic - at least the last time I used it, many years ago. The command was created to use in patches to provide a quick verification that the file being patched was "the right one".) I've always found it surprising that no one seems to have developed similar tools for Unix - with the Gnu libraries for portable access to object/ executable files, it could be done relatively easily.
The "sum" command has existed in Unixes since before VMS existed. Checksum has too many characters in the name ;-).
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