21

I was looking this question and appears everything but crc. Is there a good Ubuntu way around there to do this?

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6 Answers 6

27
$ sudo apt-get install libarchive-zip-perl
$ crc32 my_file
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  • 4
    perl-Archive-Zip in fedora, mind you
    – Nemo
    Dec 18, 2015 at 13:00
  • Very helpful for comparing that a file inside a JAR is the correct version.
    – jjj
    Oct 6, 2017 at 15:40
  • 3
    Adding to what Nemo said, for CentOs, Redhat, Fedora, and similar distros the library is installed with yum install perl-Archive-Zip
    – Terry
    Sep 25, 2019 at 19:33
18

One way to calculate it is this:

cksum "file"

Another one is

crc32 "file"

To use this last command you need to install libarchive-zip-perl package

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  • 8
    cksumis not compatible with crc32, it uses different algorithm
    – red75prime
    Apr 27, 2018 at 8:29
  • I don't know which type of CRC the OP had, but the version of cksum on my Linux box (a Synology NAS unit) can produce four different outputs. One with no parameters (cksum file) but it also accepts -o1 through -o3 options. Using -o3 produces the same value as used in "CSV verification files" (albeit it produces them in decimal, the files have them in hex)... that might be the same algorithm as the OP needs.
    – TripeHound
    Nov 20, 2020 at 12:29
  • @TripeHound The cksum version (9.1) currently in debian 12 doesn't seem to have any -o1 through -o3 algorithms. But it does have the -a / --algorithm options, however none appear to match the crc32 from libarchive-zip-perl, cksfv, or rhash. Even cksum's crc algorithm outputs a decimal number that does not convert to the same hex the others report
    – Xen2050
    Feb 19 at 0:58
4

I'd use the internal md5sum one of the provided sha programs:

sha1sum (1)          - compute and check SHA1 message digest
sha224sum (1)        - compute and check SHA224 message digest
sha256sum (1)        - compute and check SHA256 message digest
sha384sum (1)        - compute and check SHA384 message digest
sha512sum (1)        - compute and check SHA512 message digest

cksum is pretty much outmoded these days because of its problems.

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  • 3
    What problems? I want to know if two files are duplicates - is cksum not good enough for that purpose?
    – Marc.2377
    Nov 24, 2019 at 6:06
  • Perhaps the "problem" is the fact that CRC is not a cryptographic hash (meaning it's considered easy to create two files with different contents that have the same CRC if that's what you're trying to do). However, when you're talking about random errors, CRC is not too bad AFAIK.
    – adentinger
    Jan 28, 2020 at 19:28
  • 2
    CRC is about 10x faster than md5 in my current tests. So CRC vs md5/sha involves a tradeoff between key space (probability of accidental collision) and performance. In a small device or with high data volume performance might matter. Feb 11, 2021 at 17:11
4

cksfv app from cksfv package generates CRC32 checksum as well.

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  • 2
    could you give a usage example?
    – Zanna
    Dec 8, 2016 at 6:58
  • cksfv -c "file" prints the CRC32 to stdout. If you want to suppress the header, a cksfv -c "file" 2>/dev/null | grep -v ^\; gives the filename + CRC32 and no warning for a directory.
    – emk2203
    Jun 14, 2019 at 17:12
3

You can try to use rhash.

Test:

$ sudo apt-get install rhash
$ echo -n 123456789 | rhash --simple -
cbf43926  (stdin)
0

you can accomplish this with a very simple perl script. use String::CRC32;

my $s = <STDIN>;

my $crc = crc32($s);
printf "%08x\n", $crc;
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  • Sounds good, but how can someone with zero perl knowledge turn this into a working answer? Or even a one liner?
    – Xen2050
    Feb 19 at 0:14

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