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

windows checksum
Bialecki picture Bialecki · Jan 26, 2009 · Viewed 212.2k times · Source

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

Laisvis Lingvevicius picture Laisvis Lingvevicius · Mar 8, 2015

The CertUtil is a pre-installed Windows utility, that can be used to generate hash checksums:

CertUtil -hashfile pathToFileToCheck [HashAlgorithm]

HashAlgorithm choices: MD2 MD4 MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA384 SHA512

So for example, the following generates an MD5 checksum for the file C:\TEMP\MyDataFile.img:

CertUtil -hashfile C:\TEMP\MyDataFile.img MD5

To get output similar to *Nix systems you can add some PS magic:

$(CertUtil -hashfile C:\TEMP\MyDataFile.img MD5)[1] -replace " ",""

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