Question

Is there a way to do a checksum on windows machines like on unix/linux machines?

I cannot download any 3rd party tools and wondering if there was something similar natively?

Answer 1

You can get get the MD5 hash of the file. You would essentially parse the file and pass it into this function as a string. e.g.

 public string GetMD5Hash(string input)
    {
        System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider x = new System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
        byte[] bs = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input);
        bs = x.ComputeHash(bs);
        System.Text.StringBuilder s = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
        foreach (byte b in bs)
        {
            s.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower());
        }
        string password = s.ToString();
        return password;
    }

(taken from here)

…or as a file:

protected string GetMD5HashFromFile(string fileName)
{
  FileStream file = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open);
  MD5 md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
  byte[] retVal = md5.ComputeHash(file);
  file.Close();

  StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
  for (int i = 0; i < retVal.Length; i++)
  {
    sb.Append(retVal[i].ToString("x2"));
  }
  return sb.ToString();
}

Taken from here Calculate MD5 Checksum for File