Leandro Lameiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> What's wrong in having a function like the one I said, that would
> split files for you, feed md5.update and, when it is over, return the
> digest?
Nothing in particular; it's just a trivial thing to write. If you add
every usefull utility function to the standard library, you wind up
with a multi-thousand page library documentation. The line has to be
drawn somewhere.
> It is easier, doesn't require MD5 objects creation, works well on
> small and big files, makes the code more readable and simple. Also,
> calculating MD5 of files seems to be a common enough task to be put in
> the library (well, at least on GNU/Linux we have one command just for
> this - md5sum)
Wanting to sum a file at the command line isn't that uncommon, so a
utility makes some sense. But how often does a program need the md5
sum of a file? Especially compared to how often it wants to take the
md5 sum of some string that isn't in a file?
It might be worth adding. Except that md5 isn't really trusted
anymore; you really want to be using sha1 (and you presumably have an
sha1sum utility. FreeBSD has md5 and sha1 commands). But the sha
module doesn't have a file handler either.
You might try posting a patch to sourceforge, and see if it gets
accepted.
<mike
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Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
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