When downloading file from internet or other system, network or removable devices in some case before using them files should be evaluated for health and integrity (assuming the source file is acceptable and working fine).
Under different OS this activity could be different for example under Linux it’s possible to use “md5sum” command to evaluate the “MD5” hash for file.
Under Microsoft Windows OS there was no built in application (at least I’m not aware so far) but Microsoft was kind enough to provide small application named “Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV)” which is accessible from here and installation and usage is very simple.
Note #1
During application installation it’s possible to set “Windows Folder” as installation path so in future by providing the application name in CMD/PowerShell it’d start and no customization under “Path” would be needed.
Now think of a folder includes multiple files and MD5/SHA1 for all files needed to be calculated; in this case there are multiple way of doing so.
Hard-way
This way we can use both PowerShell and FCIV at the same time like two below lines which first one only calculated the “MD5” and second one doing same but instead of showing output the result would be save in the “md5.txt” file.
Get-ChildItem -Path ./ | where {$_.name -like “*.zip”} | %{fciv $_}
Get-ChildItem -Path ./ | where {$_.name -like “*.zip”} | %{fciv $_ >> .\md5.txt}
Easy-way
This is built in capability of the FCIV and only needed thing is to define a target folder includes files and “-r” parameters like below command.
fciv C:\Users\Sohrab\Downloads\Software\VMware\ -r
