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

[David Relson]

On Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:07:11 +0200
Boris 'pi' Piwinger wrote:

> 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

The test confirms that encoding with utf-8 produces the same result.