md5sum [was: bogofilter-0.95.2 - new current release]

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> wrote:

>I'm not familiar with md5.  Is it the same as md5sum?  

I don't know. It says:
:NAME
:     md5 - calculate a message-digest fingerprint (checksum) for a file
:
:SYNOPSIS
:     md5 [-pqrtx] [-s string] [file ...]
:
:DESCRIPTION
:     Md5 takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a
:     128-bit ``fingerprint'' or ``message digest'' of the input.  It is con-
:     jectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages
:     having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given
:     prespecified target message digest.  The MD5 algorithm is intended for
:     digital signature applications, where a large file must be ``compressed''
:     in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key
:     under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

>The command is
>used in script src/tests/t.encoding.  Try changing 'md5sum' to 'md5'
>and running "t.encoding -v".  If there's no complaint, the test has
>succeeded.

I meant: What is the use of md5? Why do we have the test in
the first place?

pi