> Current stable version of coreutils (6.9) has 8(!) utilities > which somehow compute or/and check a message digest. They are: > 'md5sum', 'sha1sum', 'sha224sum', 'sha256sum', 'sha384sum', > 'sha512sum' and finally 'sum' and 'cksum'. It's already a little > bit confusing and it seems that it isn't the endpoint yet. There > is at least one more under discussion right now - 'md4sum'.
The sum, cksum and md5sum utilities are frequently used in scripts and so those (at least) should IMO remain accessible under those names. Perhaps we could install a unified binary whose behaviour depends on the value of argv[0]. That tends to be discouraged, from (standards)User Interfaces: | Please don't make the behavior of a utility depend on the name used | to invoke it. It is useful sometimes to make a link to a utility | with a different name, and that should not change what it does. I don't see any major problem why something like `hashsum ALGORITHM' wouldn't work though, `md5sum' could be the same as `hashsum md5'. And then md5sum could be a shell script, or just a simple program that calls `hashsum md5'. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
