md5deep

md5deep is a software package used in the computer security, system administration and computer forensics communities for purposes of running large numbers of files through any of several different cryptographic digests. It was originally authored by Jesse Kornblum, at the time a Special Agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, and is still maintained by him.

The name md5deep is misleading. As of version 2.0, the md5deep package contains several different programs capable of performing MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, Tiger192 and Whirlpool digests, each one of them named by the digest type followed by the word deep—thus, the name may confuse some people into thinking it only provides the MD5 algorithm when the package supports many more.

md5deep can be invoked in several different ways. Typically a user will operate it recursively, where md5deep walks through one directory at a time giving digests of each file found, and recursing into any subdirectories within. Its recursive behavior is approximately depth-first, which has the benefit of presenting files in lexicographical order. On Unix-style systems, similar functionality can be often obtained by combining find with hashing utilities such as md5sum, sha256sum, or tthsum.

md5deep exists for Windows and most UNIX-based systems, including Mac OS X. It is present in Mac OS X's Fink, Homebrew and MacPorts projects. Binary packages exist for most free UNIX systems. Many vendors initially resist including md5deep as they mistakenly believe its functionality can be reproduced with a single line of shell scripting.^[1] The matching functionality of the program, however, cannot be done easily in shell.

Because md5deep was written by an employee of the U.S. government on government time, it is in the public domain. Other software surrounding it, such as graphical front-ends, may be copyrighted.

See also

• Comparison of file verification software
• Hash functions MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-2 (which includes SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512)

References

External links

• md5deep at SourceForge