How to assign a Git SHA1's to a file without Git?

Question

This is how Git calculates the SHA1 for a file (or, in Git terms, a "blob"):

sha1("blob " + filesize + "\0" + data)

So you can easily compute it yourself without having Git installed. Note that "\0" is the NULL-byte, not a two-character string.

For example, the hash of an empty file:

sha1("blob 0\0") = "e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391"

$ touch empty
$ git hash-object empty
e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391

Another example:

sha1("blob 7\0foobar\n") = "323fae03f4606ea9991df8befbb2fca795e648fa"

$ echo "foobar" > foo.txt
$ git hash-object foo.txt 
323fae03f4606ea9991df8befbb2fca795e648fa

Here is a Python implementation:

from hashlib import sha1
def githash(data):
    s = sha1()
    s.update("blob %u\0" % len(data))
    s.update(data)
    return s.hexdigest()

A little goodie: in shell

echo -en "blob ${#CONTENTS}\0$CONTENTS" | sha1sum

You can make a bash shell function to calculate it quite easily if you don't have git installed.

git_id () { printf 'blob %s\0' "$(ls -l "$1" | awk '{print $5;}')" | cat - "$1" | sha1sum | awk '{print $1}'; }

Take a look at the man page for git-hash-object. You can use it to compute the git hash of any particular file. I think that git feeds more than just the contents of the file into the hash algorithm, but I don't know for sure, and if it does feed in extra data, I don't know what it is.

/// Calculates the SHA1 for a given string
let calcSHA1 (text:string) =
    text 
      |> System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes
      |> (new System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1CryptoServiceProvider()).ComputeHash
      |> Array.fold (fun acc e -> 
           let t = System.Convert.ToString(e, 16)
           if t.Length = 1 then acc + "0" + t else acc + t) 
           ""
/// Calculates the SHA1 like git
let calcGitSHA1 (text:string) =
    let s = text.Replace("\r\n","\n")
    sprintf "blob %d%c%s" (s.Length) (char 0) s
      |> calcSHA1

This is a solution in F#.