How to ensure the integrity of your VERY LARGE files on AIX

Something that I’ve learnt by time is that I must check my files – especially big ones – upon transferring them from one medium to another or through a network or you’re really going to face troubles that you’ll see everyday in your worst nightmares :(. Anyway, it’s very simple and quite fast, there are lots of methods available and here are my favourite two:

  1. “csum -h MD5 file_name” #for small files, it’s very fast
  2. If the above doesn’t work, use this instead “cksum file_name” #For very large files

Both will produce an output for you that will consist of numbers, characters or both, just do this on the source medium and the destination medium (after file transfer) and if the outputs match, the file is healthy, otherwise you must re-transfer the file and re-calculate the sum, Enjoy!

About SoCRaT

Systems Engineer, OSS & Linux Geek
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