What is the best way to calculate a checksum for a file that is on my machine?

Question

I'm on a Windows machine and I want to run a checksum on the MySQL distribution I just got. It looks like there are products to download, an unsupported Microsoft tool, and probably other options. I'm wondering if there is a consensus for the best tool to use. This may be a really easy question, I've just never run a checksum routine before.

Answer 1

I personally use Cygwin, which puts the entire smörgåsbord of Linux utilities at my fingertip --- there's md5sum and all the cryptographic digests supported by OpenSSL. Alternatively, you can also use a Windows distribution of OpenSSL (the "light" version is only a 1 MB installer).

Answer 2

Any MD5 will produce a good checksum to verify the file. Any of the files listed at the bottom of this page will work fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5sum

Answer 3

best and most convenient, http://beeblebrox.org/hashtab/

Answer 4

On MySQL.com, MD5s are listed alongside each file that you can download. For instance, MySQL "Windows Essentials" 5.1 is 528c89c37b3a6f0bd34480000a56c372.

You can download md5 (md5.exe), a command line tool that will calculate the MD5 of any file that you have locally. MD5 is just like any other cryptographic hash function, which means that a given array of bytes will always produce the same hash. That means if your downloaded MySQL zip file (or whatever) has the same MD5 as they post on their site, you have the exact same file.

Answer 5

Just use win32 Checksum api. MD5 is native in Win32.

Answer 6

Note that the above solutions will not tell you if your installation is correct only if your install.exe is correct (you can trust it to produce a correct install.)

You would need MD5 sums for each file/folder to test if the installed code has been messed with after the install completed.

WinMerg is useful to compare two installs (on two different machines perhaps) to see if one has been changed or why one is broken.