Command to verify integrity of downloaded file linux

If you were running a checksum against a file, the name would be listed instead of a dash. Here we generated a checksum of a text file containing all lines of the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. If we edit the file and change one character, the checksum will change.

Even though we only made a very small change in the file, the checksum is dramatically different. This allows you to easily notice that the file has changed. In depth analysis of hashing algorithms is beyond the scope of this tutorial. However, it is important to know that not all algorithms are created equally. For example, MD5 has well documented weaknesses more info in the resources and links section below.

A good hashing algorithm will ensure that even small variations in the input file will generate huge differences in the output hash. Thanks to this, is it practically impossible to tamper with a file in any way and have the hash be similar.

If the hashes of two files have been generated by a good algorithm, and they match, you can be next to certain that the two files are the same.

Because of this, all good software providers also display their hashes next to the files they offer for download. Like this:. SHA is good enough for our purposes. The 64 characters you see here make up the SHA hash for the file we want to download. To verify it, we first download the file itself via wget as shown here:. Contents Introduction.

From the Cisco Download Software link, place the cursor over the file you want to download and this gives additional file details, which includes the MD5 and SHA checksum, as shown in the image: On a Windows PC, there is an inbuilt tool certutil which you can use with the MD5 or SHA hash algorithms amongst others to establish the unique checksum of any file.

This confirms the validity of the file transferred to the switch. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Home About. Windows CertUtil is a pre-installed tool to work with X certificates. SHA1 hash of the file AtaraxiS. CertUtil : - hashfile command completed successfully. MD5 hash of the file AtaraxiS.