Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 03:29:05 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: how can i be certain that a file has copied exactly? Message-ID: <87ocyy2you.fsf@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <20081227011335.GA29354@thought.org> (Gary Kline's message of "Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:13:39 -0800") References: <20081227011335.GA29354@thought.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:13:39 -0800, Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> wrote:
> is there a way i can be sure that my little C program has copied a
> dos/win file named, say, foo.htm\;7 to simply foo.htm?
>
> my program uses fopen/fgets/fputs to copy the markup files. of the
> several i have copied, no problem. unless i hack cmp or diff, i have
> to avoid the shell.
>
> any ideas? in other words, does anybody have a prefab cmp(oldfile,
> newfile) fn?
You don't need a prefab `cmp' function, because the base system already
includes tools that can help:
(a) The `cmp' utility:
cmp file1 file2 ; echo $?
(b) Checksum tools like `md5', `sha1' and `sha256':
md5 file1 file2
sha1 file1 file2
sha256 file1 file2
You can then compare the file checksums. If both the md5 and
sha256 checksums are identical, then the files are the same[1].
[1] There is a possibility of ``checksum collisions'', especially
with md5 (see [2] for more details). But if you use two or
more checksum types and none of them show differences, the
odds of a collision are small enough for most practical
purposes.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5#Vulnerability
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?87ocyy2you.fsf>