cksum(1)

cksum -- print checksum and byte count of a file

Synopsis

cksum [file ... ]

Description

cksum calculates the 32-bit checksum of each file, and prints the result to stdout. If no file is specified, cksum reads from stdin.

For each file, cksum reads the file and calculates the checksum in a machine-independent way, then prints the checksum, number of bytes, and filename, each separated by a space. The output is one line per file. If the input is stdin, then the filename is not printed.

Files

/usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES/uxdfm: language-specific message file. See LANG on environ(5).

References

sum(1)

Diagnostics

If an error is encountered, cksum will print a diagnostic message, skip the file in which the error occurred, and continue with the next file, returning a non-zero result. If no errors occur, the exit value will be zero.

Notices

This command is a POSIX.2 command, and should be used in preference to the old System V alternative, sum, since cksum is both standard and more accurate.

Like sum, the main purpose of this command is to verify that files transferred across a suspect medium are correct, by comparing the results of cksum for the source and destination files.

This command has been updated to handle files greater than 2GB.