Re: md5sum prints binary junk when given bad input

[Jim Meyering]

"James Strother" <address@hidden> wrote:
...
> All that said, I don't want to break anyone's scripts.  If feeding emails
> into md5sum
> is a common use case, then the current behaviour should certainly be
> maintained.
> Unfortunately, I'm just not in any position to determine the frequency with
> which this
> is currently being used.  It's not something I would have ever thought to
> try, and the
> silent skipping of ill-formed lines does not seem to be prominently
> documented (it
> describes the behaviour with respect to valid lines, but does not
> specifically state that
> ill-formed lines are silently skipped).  So my guess is that very few if any
> people rely
> on this behaviour, but I would defer to someone who interacted more with
> other
> md5sum users.

Sorry, but we cannot change such a fundamental aspect of these tools.
At least not the default behavior.

If you feel strongly enough about it to pursue the matter,
see if you can justify (on this list) adding a new option
to make the tools do what you want.