[Wolves] Question....

[Matthew Walster]

On 12 Aug 2006, at 21:56, David Morley wrote:

> I can't  find a way to do this can you help please.  I want to check
> the md5sum of an online image.  I know that there are md5sum's for
> most images but they are often called different things.  I am
> basically writing a script that downloads an image to a set place then
> checks the image online with the one you have downloaded, but I need
> to find out how to check the online images md5sum in order to do this,
> is there a way?


You can't do this - unless the server has a program that would  
generate an MD5SUM, you can't remotely check the MD5 of a file, and  
for good reason - it's fairly I/O and CPU intensive, and could easily  
bring down a machine if 100 people did it at the same time on a busy  
site.

Normally, techie sites have a seperate file called .hash or .md5sum  
with it that contains an output of the MD5SUM command that can be  
read in automatically to check the authenticity of the file, and  
sometimes you can find SHA1 hashes or even GPG signatures!

Matthew Walster