[H-GEN] md5sum generation

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

On 3/26/06, Sandra Mansell <fakungabubu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Um, I'm no md5sum expert, but it seems to me that doing it on a text
> file will generate an md5sum for the file, not the contents. This would
> surely be different to generating an md5sum of the contents of the file.

What would be the difference?

$ cat f | md5sum # sum the contents of the file
51513ef4acba564835a2d88d13db115d  -
$ md5sum f # sum the file
51513ef4acba564835a2d88d13db115d  f

The issue in this case is the presence or absence of a terminating newline.