Question

When I pass this line echo -n aWord | md5 directly in shell I get the expected result – same as PHP md5('aWord') – but when I call the code from a file I get a different string.

Please help.

Answer 1

If you get following md5s:

=$ echo -n aWord | md5sum
a72ef25b2fa8080e6e0643c967284842  -

And from file:

=$ cat test.file 
aWord

=$ md5sum test.file 
1d03663ed556e850007c886ce5ad3ade  test.file

This is because there is additional character in file – new line character:

=$ hexdump -C test.file 
00000000  61 57 6f 72 64 0a                                 |aWord.|
00000006