Calculating checksums of files

Checksums are short, fixed length strings that can be calculated from arbitrarily large inputs. They are commonly used to validate the contents of files, as the checksum will change considerably even with minimal changes to the input. More information can be found on Wikipedia.

Linux and macOS
Windows

The commands for calculating checksums are very similar on Linux and OS X. They use the same tool for calculating sha256 checksums, but linux use the md5sum command for md5 checksums, while the OS X command is md5.

# Calculate md5 checksum on linux
md5sum <my-file> <my-encrypted-file>.c4gh
# ... and OS X
md5 <my-file> <my-encrypted-file>.c4gh
# The sha256 checksum command is the same on both platforms
shasum -a 256 <my-file> <my-encrypted-file>.c4gh

The results can be written to a file using the > operator:

ex.

md5sum <my-file> <my-encrypted-file>.c4gh > <my-files>.md5

Note

We couldn’t find a Windows computer to test on, so please tell us if these instructions don’t work anymore.

Installing on windows is done using Windows PowerShell. You can find PowerShell by right-clicking on the windows menu button. The tool we recommend for windows is md5checker.

To run pip to install md5checker you need to run PowerShell as Administrator (unless you run in the virtual environment), but once the tool is installed, you should run md5checker in a normal non-Administrator shell for security reasons.

pip install md5checker

Then get the md5 checksum for each file with:

md5checker <my-file>

and the sha-256 checksum with:

md5checker <my-file> -a sha256

The > operator works the same in PowerShell as it does in linux and OS X, so you can use the same syntax to write the output to a file.

md5checker <my-file> > <my-file>.md5