Display file checksums and block counts.
Writes to the standard output three (whitespace separated) fields for each input file: CRC_checksum Total_no_of_octets Filename
Syntax cksum [-o 1 | 2 | 3] [file ...] sum [file ...]
The sum utility is identical to cksum, except that it defaults to using historic algorithm 1, as described below. It is provided for compatibility only.
Options -o Use historic algorithms 1, 2 or 3 instead of the (superior) default one. file The file(s) to checksum If no file is specified, the standard input is used and no file name is written.
Algorithm 1 is the algorithm used by historic BSD systems as the
sum(1) algorithm and by historic AT&T System V UNIX systems as
the sum(1) algorithm when using the -r option. This is a 16-bit
checksum, with a right rotation before each addition; overflow is
discarded.
Algorithm 2 is the algorithm used by historic AT&T System V UNIX systems as the default sum(1) algorithm. This is a 32-bit check-sum, and is defined as follows:
s = sum of all bytes;
r = s % 2^16 + (s % 2^32) / 2^16;
cksum = (r % 2^16) + r / 2^16;
Algorithm 3 is what is commonly called the `32bit CRC' algorithm.
This is a 32-bit checksum.
Both algorithm 1 and 2 write to the standard output the same
fields as the default algorithm except that the size of the file
in bytes is replaced with the size of the file in blocks. For
historic reasons, the block size is 1024 for algorithm 1 and 512
for algorithm 2. Partial blocks are rounded up.
Notes
exit 0 on success, and >0 if an error
occurs.
The default CRC used is based on the polynomial used for CRC error checking
in the networking standard ISO/IEC 8802-3:1989
The checksum
encoding algorithm is explained in the full cksum man page.
“Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world” ~ Mary Shafer NASA Flight Research Center
Related:
md5(1)
cksum man page - Apple.com