easy md5sum check

I've always checked my md5sums the hard way, by running

$ md5sum [filename-of-the-iso]

and then visually checking the resulting md5sum, digit by digit.

Duh. RTFM.

Well, today I downloaded GParted Live and found the following from their checksums page:

a2b1a962a7d8df4aab68c22618d7cb2c  gparted-live-0.16.2-1b-i486.iso

So:

steve[~]$ cd Downloads/
steve[~/Downloads]$ echo "a2b1a962a7d8df4aab68c22618d7cb2c  gparted-live-0.16.2-1b-i486.iso" | md5sum -c -
gparted-live-0.16.2-1b-i486.iso: OK

Much quicker and easier.

Another approach (this one takes an extra step, but is really just as quick and easy) is to create a file (I'll name mine hash.md5) that contains the correct md5sum and the filename of the iso (with two spaces between the md5sum and the filename. The following shows the contents of my hash.md5 file:

steve[~/Downloads]$ cat hash.md5

a2b1a962a7d8df4aab68c22618d7cb2c  gparted-live-0.16.2-1b-i486.iso

To check the md5sum of the iso:

steve[~/Downloads]$ md5sum -c hash.md5

gparted-live-0.16.2-1b-i486.iso: OK

For more info, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5sum#File_produced