md5tree

md5tree

Why?

I wrote this because I needed a tool to save large directory trees of md5 hashes to periodically verify the data integrity of archived files. Backups are great, but bitrot is the essence of evil. After searching, I found that nobody really seemed to have solved this problem - at least in a way that fits my needs - so I decided to write something and make it available to the world. I hope at least one other person finds that it makes their lives easier.

Pull requests welcome.

Usage

To scan the current directory:

md5tree .

To save the hashes:

md5tree -l ~/data/hashes.ldb .

To see if the hashes have changed since the last scan:

md5tree -l ~/data/hashes.ldb -c .

You could also use the environment variable MD5TREE_DATADIR to specify where the leveldb data directory is located.

Specifying a different location with -l will overried the MD5TREE_DATADIR.

export MD5TREE_DATADIR=${HOME}/data/md5tree.ldb
md5tree -c .

If -c is specified, the exit code of md5tree will be 2 if a hash fails. Otherwise it will exit with 0.

Notes

• Ignores symlinks, sockets, devices, named pipes
• Console output attempts to maintain compatibility with md5sum; please submit a github issue or pull request if you run accross an issue.