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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Computing: MD5 Command-Line Utility Updated

I have posted an update to the MD5 command-line utility for Unix-like platforms and Win32 machines. This release, version 2.2, corrects a problem reported by Dr. Andreas Arning of IBM Germany. When the ability to compute the MD5 signature of multiple file names specified on the command line was added to the program, I neglected to close the files after computing the signature, so if you specified a large number of files, the command would fail after exhausting the system's maximum number of open file handles. The fix closes the files, and should allow computing the signature of as many files as the shell permits you to specify on the command line.

The updated distributions include both source code and a ready-to-run Win32 console application. The Web page for the application has been updated to XHTML 1.0, using the standard Fourmilab style sheet and Unicode text entities.

Posted at January 15, 2008 23:55