Could timestamps be replaced with MD5?

[Lenny Foner]

    Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 12:42:46 -0700
    From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

    Lenny Foner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 04/18/2000 08:36:12 AM

    To:   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
    cc:   [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
          [EMAIL PROTECTED] (bcc: Rex Jolliff/YM/RWDOE)

    Subject:  Could timestamps be replaced with MD5?

    >Of course, it's entirely likely that there are wider-than-32-bit CRC's
    >which are much faster to compute than either MD5 or SHA-1.  Such CRC's
    >presumably only require -reading- the entire file, but not storing
    >-all- of it in memory at any given time.

    MD5 is only required to see each contiguous 512 bytes of a file at a time
    concurrently.

Indeed; an "also" fell out of my text.  I was pointing out that none
of the proposals so far actually require holding an entire file in
memory (despite someone's comment to the contrary; I no longer recall
who).  Not that that's the critical point, of course; communications
with whatever's storing the files is likely to be the bottleneck.