md5sum doesn't document behavior for backslash-in-filename

[Jonesy]

Binary package hint: coreutils

Hi,
I think I may have discovered a bug in md5sum.

When I generate the checksum of a file with a backslash in the filename, it prepends a backslash to the hash, and then also escapes the backslash in the output filename. Please see example below:

$ md5sum "test\file"
\d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e test\\file

This was on ubuntu 6.06 and 5.10. Does not occur in Debian 3.1.

Thanks for your time,
Andrew Jones

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Wow, what an odd bug.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Confirmed still a problem in feisty, and without the Ubuntu patches, and in upstream's latest (v6.9). Debian seems to be on 5.2.1, so the bug was apparently introduced since them.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Okay.... /not/ a bug, apparently. The source-code for md5sum contains:

              /* Output a leading backslash if the file name contains
                 a newline or backslash. */
              if (strchr (file, '\n') || strchr (file, '\\'))
                putchar ('\\');

So, apparently, this is by design.

However, neither the manpage nor the infopage mentions this at all, so I would consider this a documentation bug, definitely.

It looks like the documentation has been fixed in CVS and at least the latest release, 6.9.

See http://<email address hidden>/msg09713.html

[Antoine Amarilli (a3nm)]

It looks like this behaviour is now mentioned by the infopage:

"If FILE contains a backslash or newline, the line is started with a backslash, and each problematic character in the file name is escaped with a backslash, making the output unambiguous even in the presence of arbitrary file names."

Accordingly, this bug should be closed.