An now for the stupid question of the day: md5sum differences for "/bin/cp"

[David Tonhofer, m-plify S.A.]

Hi there,

Does anyone know why e.g. /bin/cp should yield different
checksum on different machines that have the same OS (RH4.0)?
It's the same hardware, too, which means same architecture.
This also happens for other binaries.

Machine 1:

# rpm --query --file /bin/cp; md5sum /bin/cp
coreutils-5.2.1-31.2
7f2f4e0c5e9bfa6cc1d7a60efd85e086  /bin/cp

Machine 2:

[root at yui bin]# rpm --query --file /bin/cp; md5sum /bin/cp
coreutils-5.2.1-31.2
3e815101b070a1a115a73b01e5218a0b  /bin/cp

Machine 3:

# rpm --query --file /bin/cp; md5sum /bin/cp
coreutils-5.2.1-31.2
6114d9471c94f1d70d49363f42db635f  /bin/cp

Best

-- David