remote md5sums

[Tim Chase]

On 12/07/11 19:05, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Has Linux anywhere got a tool that will take as input an url
> point at a file name and return the md5sum of that remote
> file?

Via HTTP and providing a URL, not short of downloading the file 
and running the checksum over the file locally, and then 
downloading the file again and making sure the checksum matches.

Your options for remote checksumming are (1) to have the checksum 
on the server as is often the case when you go to download an ISO 
and the checksum is an arbitrary link adjacent to the download 
link; or (2) have remote-shell access to the machine in question 
to run the checksum there instead of locally.

In theory, one *might* be able to use the E-tag mechanism of 
HTTP, but there's no guarantee that it's the md5 checksum, an 
sha1 checksum, or just some arbitrary identifier.  So it would 
completely depend on the site from which you were downloading.

-tim