Re: md5sum & DOS text files

[Bob Proulx]

> It would be VERY convenient for md5sum to deal with the extra line
> feed character.  Is there any reason why you wouldn't accept a patch
> to have it deal with this problem automatically?

Thanks for your report.  Perhaps I am missing something but I don't
understand the problem.  Your output did not match this question.  If
you want md5sum to computer a result ignoring carriage-return
characters then they could be easily stripped out with a filter before
handing them to md5sum.  But I recommend against that since those
characters are really part of the file and removing them should change
the signature of the file.

> Currently, if the file is a DOS text file, the user gets this:
> 
> address@hidden:/home/ftp/pub/disk2/gd72-09-23.shnf>md5sum -c gd72-09-23d1.md5 
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read
> : No such file or directory
> : FAILED open or read

When you say "DOS text file" what does that mean?  A file on a DOS
filesystem?  Or a file that uses carriage-return, newline instead of a
simple newline to delimit text lines?

In either case md5sum should read and process the file correctly.  The
message shown indicates a problem reading the file.  Does "cat" have
the same problem, as in "cat gd72-09-23d1.md5 >/dev/null"?  

You also did not mention the version of md5sum that you were using.
It is possible that you have a broken version.  If you would like to
try a test beta version to see if your problem has already been fixed
then newer versions are available at:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/textutils-2.0.13.tar.gz
  ftp://freefriends.org/gnu/fetish/textutils-2.0.13.tar.gz

Bob