What is the best way to calculate a checksum for a file that is on my machine?

Question

I'm on a Windows machine and I want to run a checksum on the MySQL distribution I just got. It looks like there are products to download, an unsupported Microsoft tool, and probably other options. I'm wondering if there is a consensus for the best tool to use. This may be a really easy question, I've just never run a checksum routine before.

Answer 1

The CertUtil is a pre-installed Windows utility, that can be used to generate hash checksums:

CertUtil -hashfile pathToFileToCheck [HashAlgorithm] 

HashAlgorithm choices: MD2 MD4 MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA384 SHA512

So for example, the following generates an MD5 checksum for the file C:\TEMP\MyDataFile.img:

CertUtil -hashfile C:\TEMP\MyDataFile.img MD5 

To get output similar to *Nix systems you can add some PS magic:

$(CertUtil -hashfile C:\TEMP\MyDataFile.img MD5)[1] -replace " ",""