Wierd issue with md5sum.

[Jon Larabee]

Hi there,

Just a while ago, I noticed a strange behavior in md5sum (frankly it 
scared the crap out of me), which made me think at first that my machine 
had been compromised, however I am fairly certain this is not the case.
What it was, was that I use md5sum a lot to make checksums of things, and 
often I do it on an ascii based, fairly critical file of mine. What I have 
noticed, that after I login the first time (always after I login never 
after I have let it sit awhile), if I do md5sum, the checksum will appear 
completely correct except a 'c' will prepend it. I obviously thought that 
there was something wrong here and my first gut reaction was go check the 
version it was 5.2.1. This puzzled me, and I thought perhaps I had a 
compromised binary. I decided to do the following then. I downloaded the 
coreutils package from a good slackware site (slackware ten) and used the 
md5sum binary to check my own binary. They matched. I then checked it the 
other way. Still matched. I checked each one against itself, they 
matched. Therefore, I am kind of wondering what else I might want to do? 
Perhaps boot with a Knoppix CD, and take an md5 sum of md5sum vs the sum I 
get when I take the md5 sum of the md5sum binary on the harddrive? It is 
not a really terrible issue as after the first time I have this happen 
(and strangely it does not happen all the time!), it works just 
fine until I login again in which it may be fine, or it may prepend the 
'c' charecter to the front of the checksum. Any ideas?

                                Thanks,

                                        Jon

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