Using --check on a md5sum command generated checksum file is failing

Question

I'm encountering an error when I try and run md5sum -c on a checksum file I generated. I should mention that I'm running this from PowerShell (as a script will be running this eventually) and this is the cygwin version of md5sum.

I have a test file, jira_defect.txt and I've created a checksum like this:

md5sum jira_defect.txt > result.md5

This gives a file with the following:

7d559b59459052f274e290b5e01a5485 *jira_defect.txt

But when I run

md5sum -c result.md5

I get the infamous error message

result.md5: no properly formatted MD5 checksum lines found

I've tried this again with the -t option, which removes the asterisk, but this hasn't made a difference.

Answer 1

Using the redirection operator to write the checksums to an output file causes the file to be created with the default encoding (Unicode). md5sum expects an ASCII file. Use Set-Content (or Out-File) to save the file with ASCII encoding:

md5sum jira_defect.txt | Set-Content result.md5 -Encoding ASCII

You can also work with Unicode files if you pipe their content into md5sum:

Get-Content result.md5 | md5sum -c

Demonstration:

PS C:\> md5sum .\test.ps1 > result.md5
PS C:\> md5sum -c .\result.md5
C:\md5sum.exe: .\result.md5: no properly formatted MD5 checksum lines found
PS C:\> Get-Content .\result.md5 | md5sum -c
.\test.ps1: OK
PS C:\> md5sum .\test.ps1 | Set-Content result.md5 -Encoding ASCII
PS C:\> md5sum -c .\result.md5
.\test.ps1: OK