30 July 2008 - 15:08recursive md5 hashing with Linux

The problem: You need a md5sum of a directory. Unfortunately, md5sum just accepts files as input.

The solution: Let’s use find! Okay. Here we go:

find DIRECTORY -type f -exec md5sum ‘{}’ \; | md5sum – | awk ‘{print $1}’

explanation:

-type f

just shows files

-exec

run the following command

‘{}’

find’s results to hand over to the command

\;

tell -exec that end of command has been reached

| md5sum -

hand over the results of the first md5sum (one sum for each file) to another

| awk ‘{print $1}’

beautify the output as we just want to have the md5sum. nothing more, nothing less.