Talk:Md5sum

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Contents 1 What MD5 stands for 2 Qualifying the "exact copy" claim 3 How does it work? 4 Broken Link 5 The current tag stating "This article reads like a man-page" 6 Made easier usage examples 7 Wikipedia is not a repository for how-to information

[edit] What MD5 stands for

What does md5 stand for?

From MD5: MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5)

Also see RFC 1321. --Teratornis 19:26, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Qualifying the "exact copy" claim

Two non-identical files have a very low but non-zero probability of generating the same MD5 hash. I clarified this in Md5sum#Usage, which previously stated that if two copies of a file produce the same MD5 hash, they must be identical. That is virtually always true but is not absolutely guaranteed to be true. This is trivially easy to recognize from the fact that there are more possible files than MD5 hashes, because MD5 hashes have a fixed length, and files can be of any length. See RFC 1321 for more about the computational effort of constructing two non-identical files with the same MD5 hash (and thus something about the probability that two randomly-chosen non-identical files will have the same MD5 hash). --Teratornis 19:26, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How does it work?

Perhaps more description about the summing process itself instead of glossing over it's purpose and then giving a usage synopsis. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Memotype (talk • contribs) 16:25, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Broken Link

Anyone have a new link to md5-paper.pdf? Should it be removed? JohnMccabeDansted (talk) 17:30, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The current tag stating "This article reads like a man-page"

I personally don't think that this article reads like a man page (even though it does give a few usage examples) and, unfortunately, the editor who added the tag left no suggestions on the talk page (he or she was editing from an IP address, so it is doubtful he or she could be contacted about it).  :-( I am inclined to remove it. What do others think? --Iamunknown 20:52, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Made easier usage examples

The usage examples which were there before assumed that the person knows what he's doing. Hence added couple of usage examples which will make it easier for newbies to do the same. If anybody has any issues, please connect with me before deleting/changing the same. [[User:Shirishag75|Shirishag75]] (talk) 07:32, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia is not a repository for how-to information

Sorry folks, but how-to info should go elsewhere. The "usage examples" were more than usage examples - they smacked of how-to. As most of this article was howto - and blatantly read like a howto ("you can run this command," "you can just do this with these arguments," etc.) - I felt compelled to axe most of the article. The usage examples weren't really of much use in explaining the program or its point per se. Tjvanwyk (talk) 22:11, 13 April 2008 (UTC)