CKDIST(1)

💖 CKDIST(1) — check software distributions 💖

okay so bestie, this is the General Commands Manual page for ckdist, and honestly it's giving "I verify your whole software distribution's vibe" and I'm obsessed. Let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

ckdist — check software distributions

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ckdist [-airsx] [-d dir] [-n name] [-t type] file ...

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

okay so picture this: ckdist reads "checksum" files — and like, we're assuming those files specify components of a software distribution — and then it verifies the integrity of that distribution by validating the checksum of each component file. slay. it supports both MD5 (the 128-bit "message digest") and .inf (32-bit CRC) checksum formats, so bestie's got range 💅

the file operands can point at regular files or at directories. regular files named md5, or ones that have an .md5 extension or an .inf extension, are assumed to be of the implied type — otherwise the format gets determined from content. iykyk. and if you hand it a directory? it gets searched only for appropriately-named files ✨

the options are as follows:

• -a — report on all distribution components, not just the ones where errors got detected 👑
• -i — ignore missing distribution components 🙈
• -r — search the specified directories recursively 🌀
• -s — suppress complaints about inaccessible checksum files and directories 🤫
• -x — verify the existence of distribution components (and also check sizes, in the case of .inf files), but skip the more time-consuming step of actually computing and comparing checksums. it's the "are you even there" check, not the "let's do the math" check 💀
• -d dir — look for distribution components in the directory dir 📁
• -n name — access distribution components using the filename name. when accessing .inf file components, append the appropriate extension to the filename 🏷️
• -t type — assume that all specified checksum files are of the format type, and search directories only for files in this format (where type is either md5 or inf) 🔥

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⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

ckdist exits with one of these values:

0       No errors were detected.
1       Errors were found in a distribution.
2       Usage errors, inaccessible input files, or other system errors
        were encountered.

so like, 0 is the "we ate and left no crumbs" ending, 1 means the distribution had problems, and 2 means something else went wrong entirely 🫶

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• cksum(1)
• md5(1)

🌈 NOTES 🌈

both BSD and DOS versions of ckdist are available — iconic, honestly 💜

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aww okay that's the whole page bestie! this one's from the Debian crew, dated January 20, 1997, and it's still serving checksum-verification realness. mwah 💋