Re: md5sum suggestion

[Bob Proulx]

> It would be very helpful to have a "recursive" option in md5sum (or any
> other *sum utility, for that matter).  That way, an entire directory tree
> could be summed into a file in order to do integrity checking (with
> the "check" flag) at later dates.  For example:
> 
> % md5sum -r /home/foo > /home/bar/check.md5
> 
> md5sums everything in the /home/foo path so that:
> 
> % md5sum -c /home/bar/check.md5
> 
> can validate the entire /home/foo tree.  I have attached a rough, but
> working, patch to md5sum.c to facilitate this option.  I hope you find
> this suggestion helpful!

The inclusion of patches is most rare and very nice to see.  However,
I disagree that this functionality should exist [fill in your favorite
command here].

Note that this functionality already exists using 'find'.  The find
and xargs commands are designed to operate with all of the commands 

  find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum

I responded to similar questions with the following.

  http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-fileutils/2001-June/001773.html
  http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/bug-fileutils/2000-September/000008.html

Bob