# MD5 Encode



## jimmyroys (Feb 19, 2011)

What is the MD5 and How to encode with MD5.


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## Beastie (Feb 19, 2011)

There's a man page for that: md5(1). Also any Google search would've returned a particular Wikipedia page.

In short, MD5 is a cryptographic hash algorithm that calculates, well, an MD5 checksum, i.e. a series of 32 hexadecimal characters (128-bit hash) that serves as a (hopefully) unique identification for a file. As the man page says, you use it like this:
`% md5 filename`


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