Re: md5sum not being involked in recent sharutils

[Bruce Korb]

Hi Jay,

On Friday 04 November 2005 01:44 am, jayjwa wrote:
> Earlier
> versions of md5sum may have matched this, as the problem didn't occur
> with sharutils & coreutils in the versions before the ones referenced
> here.

Before I started playing with it, md5sum only worked with a version of
it that was a decade old.  :)  In other words, it hasn't been working
for a decade, so then it did and now it doesn't.  Thanks for pointing it out.

> Since the functionality is the same, prehaps checking for something in 
> the version strings would work better, for all versions.

You are right.  I just used the same mechanism that was there before,
only updated it for something that seemed more flexible.  It is, but
not enough.

> md5sum (GNU coreutils) 5.92
> Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of
> the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
> There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
> 
> Written by Ulrich Drepper and Scott Miller.

My version:

> md5sum (coreutils) 5.2.1
> Written by Ulrich Drepper and Scott Miller.
> 
> Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
> warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

> In order for the test to work now, the string would need to be:
> 
> if echo "${f}" | \
> grep 'c, --check.*read MD5 sums from the FILEs and check them' >/dev/null 

which would fail with an older installation.  Not good, either.
This should be sufficient, and *much* simpler:

        MD5SUM=${MD5SUM-md5sum}
        f=`${MD5SUM} --version | egrep '^md5sum .*coreutils'`
        test -n "${f}" && md5check=true || md5check=false

Thanks - Bruce