monline

As a developer/admin, sometimes you might have to generate the MD5 hash of a string. Eg. last time I had to do this, when I installed the admin interface of XCache on a server. I had to create an MD5 of the admin password and put it into xcache.ini. The docs said that I should create a PHP file with something like <?php echo md5('the_password'); ?> to get the MD5 hash. However there's a much faster way, a simple command line.

If you're a regular linux user (or admin) you've probably already met the md5sum command. This was meant to generate (and compare) MD5 hashes of files. However you can generate the MD5 hash of data coming from standard input too. You just have to be careful that the input you provide to md5sum is indeed what you meant.

Here's a command line that'll work in most cases:

I wrote "most cases", because I used the -n switch of the /bin/echo command in the above example to force echo not to add a newline character automatically behind the string I supplied. Now in your case echo might refer to a shell builtin or have different switches. The point is to make sure that md5sum really gets only the string that you intended.

PS: using the various sha*sum commands (sha1sum, sha256sum, sha512sum, ...) you can use this method to generate various SHA hashes. These commands (md5sum, sha*sum) are all part of the coreutils package (Debian, Ubuntu) and are probably part of most linux distributions nowadays. Chances are high that they are all available on your linux setup too.