Comparing Hashes (sha, md5 etc.)

[admiralawsome]

I am currently searching for an easy way to compare the checksums (sha, md5 etc.) of apps i´ve downloaded but not installed - before i install something i want to know if its safe to do so. My current workflow involves the terminal app, my short-term memory and a little bit of patience. I´ve allready searched for an alternative way to compare the hashes, but none of the apps seemed to be satisfactory. So i hope that some of you allready know or use a tool wich gets the job done.

 

[barbu]

what is your workflow? I am confused by the premise...what are you trying to prevent? You want to checksum apps before you install them? Install how? Most Mac apps are standalone and distributed as zip files. Others of course have installers, but I don't know how you'd checksum the app before running the installer. I guess you could drill down into the installer to locate the files that it copies but presumably the file copy operation would not alter the files. Or perhaps you mean unix apps?

The way I use hashes is to download a file in whatever form: zip, tar, etc, and comparing the hash of the download with the hash printed on the download web page.

 

[admiralawsome]

Okay, maybe it is my bad english. When you download an app then you can check the checksum (for example: shasum ~/Desktop/DownloadedFile.dmg) against the checksum that is stated on the page from where i downloaded the file. I just want an app where i can throw in the dmg-file, paste that checksum from the page and see if the two checksums match or don´t. Like the way you seem to use it

 

[joevt]

If you have a list of checksums in the Terminal window, select the first, type Command-E to enter it as search text, then type Command-G to find next occurrence. If the next occurrence is not found then there's no match.