On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Patrick Donnelly <batr...@batbytes.com> wrote: > Why does this command prepend useless redundant information? > > $ openssl md5 <(echo foo) > MD5(/dev/fd/63)= d3b07384d113edec49eaa6238ad5ff00
--snip-- > Thank you *so* much. I would have framed this email more politely but > you have successfully punted compatibility detection onto third party > developers. There is no way for you to fix it. I'm not an OpenSSL developer, but I can field this one because the answer is fairly obvious. To answer your initial question, consider the case of "$ openssl md5 *.txt", where each line needs to have that information. The new format makes the output consistent regardless of manner of implementation, which from a future-proofing standpoint makes more sense than changing the output depending on the precise manner of input. My question is why you're depending on the output format of "openssl md5" in the first place. md5sum is almost as commonly available and is much more amenable to shell scripting, and if you're not doing shell scripting the output is irrelevant because you could be using OpenSSL as a library. Regardless, this is a simple change, and a simple awk or sed script will solve the problem while retaining compatibility with older versions. Perhaps: openssl md5 < blah | sed "s/^.*= *//" will serve. (This says, "if the line starts with an arbitrary number of characters, followed by an equals sign, followed by zero or more whitespace, remove that.") /s/ Adam ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List openssl-dev@openssl.org Automated List Manager majord...@openssl.org
