I'm trying to understand security and verification a bit more so I've been playing with getting random ISOs and verifying them with md5sum
.
For instance if I download the Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 release to ~/Downloads
I can run the following:
cd ~/Downloads
md5sum ubuntu-gnome-15.10-desktop-amd64.iso
Which after a brief pause to crunch numbers, gives me the following result:
b89cd1cee3acc2ec174f8d995bd74794 ubuntu-gnome-15.10-desktop-amd64.iso
When I check this against the Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 published MD5 hashes I get something nearly but not quite the same:
b89cd1cee3acc2ec174f8d995bd74794 *ubuntu-gnome-15.10-desktop-amd64.iso
97b49f32a70b46537c34e24e43c16526 *ubuntu-gnome-15.10-desktop-i386.iso
Can anyone explain the origin, meaning or reason for this mysterious "*"?
My understanding is that these are supposed to be identical... the only thing standing between that and me is this wildcard, so what's up with that?