Re: [ANNOUNCE] GNU fileutils 4.1

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Dave Dittrich <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 15:15:18 -0700 (PDT)
> 
> I recently submitted some suggested changes to "dd" to add MD5
> checksumming to (I think) <address@hidden>, but never heard
> back from anyone.

I didn't see it.  (Hmm, I just briefly looked for it in Google Groups
and didn't find it there either.  They've been chaotic lately though.)

Perhaps you might resend it to bug-fileutils.  I'd like to see an
explanation of why this feature is needed in dd.  You can already do
something like the following to calculate checksums of part of your disks:

  dd ibs=1024 if=/dev/hda1 count=1 | md5sum

and it's not immediately clear to me why the checksumming feature
needs to be part of "dd" proper.

(This uses the "md5sum" command that is part of textutils.)