- 1 year ago
md5sum complaining about carriage return characters
When using the md5sum
command in Windows, it may complain about carriage return characters if the input file contains text with different line endings, such as both carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) characters. This issue typically arises when dealing with files that were created or edited on different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, or macOS.
To fix this issue and ensure consistent line endings in the file, you can use the dos2unix
or unix2dos
utilities, which are available on most Linux distributions and can be installed on Windows as well.
Here are the steps to resolve the issue:
Install
dos2unix
on Windows:- If you are using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you can install
dos2unix
using the package manager of your Linux distribution. For example, on Ubuntu, you can run:sudo apt-get install dos2unix
- If you are not using WSL, you can download and install
dos2unix
from the project's GitHub repository: https://github.com/dos2unix/dos2unix
- If you are using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you can install
Convert the file to use consistent line endings:
- Open a terminal (either in WSL or the Windows command prompt).
- Use the
dos2unix
utility to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings (LF only):
This command will overwritedos2unix inputfile.txt
inputfile.txt
with the version that has consistent line endings.
Verify the MD5 checksum:
- Now that the file has consistent line endings, you should be able to run
md5sum
without any issues:bashmd5sum inputfile.txt
- Now that the file has consistent line endings, you should be able to run
After following these steps, the md5sum
command should no longer complain about carriage return characters, and you should get the correct MD5 checksum for the file.