Download and Verify

Well, we are usually downloading lots of stuff from the internet. We download softwares, movies, games, videos, podcasts, and lots of stuffs. But after download we usually don’t verify if our download was done correctly. Most of the time when you are out you download some stuff over the internet and you just don’t verify that your download was done successful with no errors what we wanted. And when we get back to use that stuff, it seems to be corrupted download. So what we are going to talk over today is how to be assured what we have downloaded is what we wanted to and its not corrupted. Actully for small sized files we have no problem because they are usually downloaded uncorrupted. The corrupted file case is only when we are downloading stuff of some MBs and more. So what to do to verify that we downloaded the correct file. For this purpose we use a tool: WINMD5. You can download this tool from the internet, click here todownload. It’s a small sized and very useful tool of only about 600 kbs and a freeware. It works for windows 95 and all those advanced releases to windows7. It’s operation is to compute the MD5 hash of a file. For any downloaded file just drag that over to the WinMD5 window and the md5 hash code now compare the hash code with the code with the code that you saw from where you downloaded the file. And for the purpose you are uploading a file to the internet then accompany the md5 hash tag generated by WinMD5 while dragging the file to it too so as whoever downloads the file can verify that he/she has downloaded the file uncorrupted. WinMD5 is for the windows system and for linux systems you can use md5sum utility . It’s very easy to use the md5sum utility and moreover you don’t have to download it. It’s along with the linux system. It computes a 128-bit checksum for each specified file.Simply for a file name mydownloadfile you can check the md5 using the command md5sum mydownloadfile. And there you’ll see the md5 hash. For more information about md5sum utility you can check info md5sum or also md5sum –help. For those mac users, you can use getMD5 or MD5 tools, beside it has its own utility which can be used by the command openssl md5 filename. Not only this but also a firefox addon is available that you can use with firefox which is available at this link.