Checking Integrity of Downloaded Files using MD5sum

This tutorial will show how to check the integrity of a downloaded file using MD5Sum. For the tutorial, I have chosen OpenSSL as an example of a file downloaded from the Internet.

Downloading OpenSSL:

Run command below to download OpenSSL.

wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8e.tar.gz

Downloading and Checking MD5sum of the downloaded file:

Run the command below to download MD5sum of the downloaded file. Please note that the MD5sum may not be at the location where you downloaded the file from, so in that case you have to check the "downloads" page (where you downloaded the file from) to find the exact URL of the MD5 file (if available).

wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8e.tar.gz.md5

Now, the next step would be checking the downloaded file's integrity. Run the commands below.

md5sum openssl-0.9.8e.tar.gz
cat openssl-0.9.8e.tar.gz.md5

The commands above will generate strings of alphanumeric characters (circled in red in the image below). Check to see if both strings are exactly the same or not. If not, the downloaded file is corrupt. Repeat the steps above (from downloading to checking) at different times, if you still face the same result contact the webmaster of the website. If the two alphanumeric strings happen to be identical then the content of the downloaded file is valid according to MD5Sum.

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