Cksum
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- The correct title of this article is cksum. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
cksum is a POSIX command that reads the files specified by the File parameter and calculates a checksum, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and the byte count for a file or files. If no files are specified, the cksum command reads standard input. The checksum, number of bytes, and file name are written to standard output.
The cksum command can be used to compare a suspect file copied or communicated over noisy transmission lines against an exact copy of a trusted file. The comparison made by the cksum command may not be cryptographically secure. However, it is unlikely that an accidentally damaged file will produce the same checksum as the original file.
The cksum command uses a CRC algorithm based on the ethernet standard frame check.
[edit] Syntax
cksum [ File ... ]
[edit] Note
The cksum command on Tru64 returns a different CRC value than on Linux/Solaris.
