MD5 And CRC-32 Calculation Utilities For Windows (Similar To Unix "md5sum -b")

MD5 And CRC-32 Calculation Utilities For Windows (Similar To Unix "md5sum -b")

One of the most common requests I receive is for a utility to calculate the MD5 message digest of a file on a Windows system. (Unix has a command to do this, md5sum.) Usually the need for such a utility arises in verifying a download (an ISO CD image, for example).

Both the graphical and console-mode utilities supplied on this page are also included in the ESRG Tool Set download, but it is far quicker and easier to just grab one or both utilities here.

Both utilities were created using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, and have no external dependencies (no .DLL dependencies, for example). They should run on any Windows 95 or later system.

Both utilities calculate the MD5 message digest only in "binary" mode (i.e. "md5sum -b" in Unix). This is the mode which is used in calculating the MD5 message digest accompanying downloads.

The graphical version of the utility presents a graphical interface

and one may then either select files using drag'n'drop or the File manu. The utility will then calculate the MD5 message digest and CRC-32 of the file(s) selected. The results may be copied and pasted for printing, archiving, or other purposes.

The console mode version of the utility, which is named md5.exe, operates similarly, except it only calculates the MD5 (no CRC-32), and it will only process one file at a time. There is also a separate CRC-32 utility available.

These standalone utilities can be downloaded from the links in the table below.

Download Link	Description	File Size And MD5
gfsw.exe	Windows graphical MD5 and CRC-32 utility.	Size: 65,536 MD-5 0c726ad4d87684a58d765540547b1f45
md5.exe	Windows console-mode MD5 utility.	Size: 53,248 MD-5: b6ced14d5488702906a3323b79aa42df
crc32.exe	Windows console-mode CRC-32 utility.	Size: 49,152 MD-5: c9e98639ad3a3ade45cf21234fb6e1e0

Other notes:

In terms of speed, the utilities seem to be about 95% as fast (i.e. almost identical speed) as the Cygwin md5sum utility.
The source code of these utilities is packaged with the ESRG Tool Set source code.
The MD5 message digest is covered in RFC 1321.

Sound credit: George Carlin, Parental Advisory.
This page maintained by David T. Ashley.
$Header: /cvsroot/esrg/sfesrg/esrgweba/htdocs/winutils/md5sum/index.html,v 1.2 2003/05/15 15:47:41 dtashley Exp $