How to get the MD5 hash of a string directly in the terminal?

Question

How do I get the MD5 hash of a string directly from the terminal?

For example, I want the string abcdefg hashed. Currently the md5sum command only accepts a filename as input. I want to simply enter the following line and everything be done with.

md5sum abcdefg
output: ac54bcf346e578feb46888b3ecd2344f

How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

You can also say something like this :

~$ echo -n Welcome | md5sum
7803ffcaea43bb81a439fde13b29bc35  -

It basically does the same thing as described by @enzotib, but is perhaps a bit simpler.

Answer 2

Very simple, it accepts stdin, so

md5sum <<<"my string"

To avoid the trailing newline added by the shell:

printf '%s' "my string" | md5sum

Answer 3

Running md5sum with no arguments at all will cause it to read input from the terminal. Type or paste whatever you want, and when you are done, press ctrl-d to end the input.

Answer 4

Among the 3 examples, one does not give the same result :

$ md5sum <<<"my string"
b9bfa87a6a126911f2246c7a615bff27  -

Other ones are correct and the right result:

2ba81a47c5512d9e23c435c1f29373cb  -

Now, let's summarize 4 examples :

$ md5sum <<<"my string"
b9bfa87a6a126911f2246c7a615bff27  -

$ md5sum <<< `echo -n "my string"`
b9bfa87a6a126911f2246c7a615bff27  -

$ printf '%s' "my string" | md5sum
2ba81a47c5512d9e23c435c1f29373cb  -

$ echo -n "my string" | md5sum
2ba81a47c5512d9e23c435c1f29373cb  -