MD5SUM(1)

📦
version 0.12.0 · 4 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💖 MD5SUM(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual entry for md5sum — she's a coreutils girlie and she's literally the moment ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

md5sum — print or check the MD5 checksums. that's it, that's the job, and she does it flawlessly 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

md5sum [OPTIONS] [FILE]...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Print or check the MD5 checksums 🫶

like, either she's making checksums for you, or she's checking the ones you already have. no in-between, no drama (well, a little drama when verification fails, obviously).

✨ OPTIONS ✨

  • -c, --check — read checksums from the FILEs and check them 👑 this is the "verify my stuff pls" mode.
  • -w, --warn — warn about improperly formatted checksum lines. she will speak up, gently but firmly 🙈
  • --status — don't output anything, status code shows success. silent queen energy, results only 🤫
  • --quiet — don't print OK for each successfully verified file. no need to hype every single win, we get it 💜
  • --ignore-missing — don't fail or report status for missing files. if it's not there, we simply don't talk about it 💀
  • --strict — exit non-zero for improperly formatted checksum lines. zero tolerance policy, periodt 🔥
  • --tag — create a BSD style checksum 🍓
  • -z, --zero — end each output line with NUL, not newline, and disable file name escaping ⭐
  • -h, --help — Print help 🧚
  • -V, --version — Print version 💖

🌈 VERSION 🌈

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

💫 EXAMPLES 💫

Calculate the MD5 checksum for one or more files:

md5sum path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

Calculate and save the list of MD5 checksums to a file:

md5sum path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ... > path/to/file.md5

Calculate an MD5 checksum from stdin:

command | md5sum

Read a file of MD5 checksums and filenames and verify all files have matching checksums:

md5sum [-c|--check] path/to/file.md5

Only show a message for missing files or when verification fails:

md5sum [-c|--check] --quiet path/to/file.md5

Only show a message when verification fails, ignoring missing files:

md5sum --ignore-missing [-c|--check] --quiet path/to/file.md5

Check a known MD5 checksum of a file:

echo known_md5_checksum_of_the_file path/to/file | md5sum [-c|--check]
The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. 🥺 (not her fault, she's still growing!!)

and that's a wrap bestie 🎀 this page is from uutils coreutils v0.12.0, dated 2026-09-25. go checksum something and slay 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from