Peter asks:
> I'm wondering if anyone knows of a similar tool to "md5sum" from Debian
> Linux, but for MPE/iX.

MPE/iX's POSIX environment has "cksum" which should also be available for
most/all other Unix variants (though you may have to twiddle options to get
each one to use the same algorithm so that you can compare values between
platforms).

cksum uses a CRC algorithm which was, I believe, designed to detect bursts
of thermal noise in transmission lines and should be a pretty good test of
whether two files are the same.

If you're worried about the chance that two files might accidentally match,
or that someone might maliciously arrange for two different files to have
the same checksum, then you'll want to use a cryptographically secure
Message Digest algorithm such as MD5 or SHA.

I suspect that md5sum can trivially be ported to MPE as a POSIX program if
someone has not already done it (it would be interesting to see just how
many of the GPLed command line programs that come with, say, RedHat Linux,
could be compiled right out of the box to run on MPE/iX as we could create a
sort of Linux distribution for MPE).

Note that all of these programs operate only on the contents of the file and
won't tell you if other attributes of the file (especially MPE file
attributes like LIMIT and record size) have changed, or if the security is
different, etc.

G.

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