How can I use Perl to get a SHA1 hash of a file from the Windows command line?

Question

I have a file called secure.txt in c:\temp. I want to run a Perl command from the command line to print the SHA1 hash of secure.txt. I'm using ActivePerl 5.8.2. I have not used Perl before, but it's the most convenient option available right now.

Answer 1

perl -MDigest::SHA1=sha1_hex -le "print sha1_hex <>" secure.txt

The command-line options to Perl are documented in perlrun. Going from left to right in the above command:

• -MDigest::SHA1=sha1_hex loads the Digest::SHA1 module at compile time and imports sha1_hex, which gives the digest in hexadecimal form.
• -l automatically adds a newline to the end of any print
• -e introduces Perl code to be executed

The funny-looking diamond is a special case of Perl’s readline operator:

The null filehandle <> is special: it can be used to emulate the behavior of sed and awk. Input from <> comes either from standard input, or from each file listed on the command line. Here's how it works: the first time <> is evaluated, the @ARGV array is checked, and if it is empty, $ARGV[0] is set to "-", which when opened gives you standard input. The @ARGV array is then processed as a list of filenames.

Because secure.txt is the only file named on the command line, its contents become the argument to sha1_hex.

With Perl version 5.10 or later, you can shorten the above one-liner by five characters.

perl -MDigest::SHA=sha1_hex -E 'say sha1_hex<>' secure.txt

The code drops the optional (with all versions of Perl) whitespace before <>, drops -l, and switches from -e to -E.

• -E commandline

  behaves just like -e, except that it implicitly enables all optional features (in the main compilation unit). See feature.

One of those optional features is say, which makes -l unnecessary.

• say FILEHANDLE LIST

• say LIST

• say

  Just like print, but implicitly appends a newline. say LIST is simply an abbreviation for

    { local $\ = "\n"; print LIST }
  

  This keyword is only available when the say feature is enabled: see feature.

If you’d like to have this code in a convenient utility, say mysha1sum.pl, then use

#! /usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use Digest::SHA1;

die "Usage: $0 file ..\n" unless @ARGV;

foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
  my $fh;
  unless (open $fh, $file) {
    warn "$0: open $file: $!";
    next;
  }

  my $sha1 = Digest::SHA1->new;
  $sha1->addfile($fh);
  print $sha1->hexdigest, "  $file\n";

  close $fh;
}

This will compute a digest for each file named on the command line, and the output format is compatible with that of the Unix sha1sum utility.

C:\> mysha1sum.pl mysha1sum.pl mysha1sum.pl 
8f3a7288f1697b172820ef6be0a296560bc13bae  mysha1sum.pl
8f3a7288f1697b172820ef6be0a296560bc13bae  mysha1sum.pl

You didn’t say whether you have Cygwin installed, but if you do, sha1sum is part of the coreutils package.

Answer 2

Try the Digest::SHA module.

C:\> perl -MDigest::SHA -e "print Digest::SHA->new(1)->addfile('secure.txt')->hexdigest"