Comment 3 for bug 84467

I'd like to point out that the output of md5sum may not necessarily be /quite/ as easy to parse as you suspect: check the output of md5sum when the filename itself includes a backslash or newline (it will begin the line with a backslash). This is by design (broken, IMO, but too established now to change).

There has been some recent discussion on this topic on the coreutils mailing list:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-03/msg00181.html

It appears that a patch for this behavior has been submitted to a branch, and awaits further testing. My guess would be that it will be present in the next release.