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Create cross-platform hashes of text files.
Hashes or checksums are a great means for validating the contents of files. You record the hash of a file, distribute the file and the hash code, and everyone can run the hasher again to verify that the file has not changed since you created the hash the first time. Each small change will also change the hash code. Even if it is a change you cannot even see.
In my job, we unfortunately had this situation a couple of times. The workflow is as follows: We create code and generate a hash from this code. Both are inserted into a specification document. Then we copy and paste the code to a customer's system and run the hasher again to verify that the code is still the same as in the specification. But from time to time, we got different hashes. After some search for the reason, we stumbled across this one coworker who did not save their files with UNIX line endings (a single LF) like the rest of us, but with Windows line endings (CR followed by LF). Just by looking at the files, they seemed identical, but after enabling control characters, we could clearly see the differences in the end of every line. By copying the code to the customer system, the line endings get automatically converted into UNIX style, hence the hash would be different from what we generate on our systems. This is an embarrassing situation, because this involves huge paper work to request a change in the already finalized specification document.
To come over this problem, I created this program. A file hasher that would convert file endings to UNIX style on the fly when generating the hash. So, no matter how the file was created, the hash would be the same.
normalized-hasher can be installed easily through Cargo via crates.io:
shell script
cargo install --locked normalized-hasher
Please note that the --locked flag is necessary here to have the exact same
dependencies as when the application was tagged and tested. Without it, you
might get more up-to-date versions of dependencies, but you have the risk of
undefined and unexpected behavior if the dependencies changed some
functionalities. The application might even fail to build if the public API of
a dependency changed too much.
Alternatively, pre-built binaries can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page.
```text
Usage: normalized-hasher
Arguments:
Options: -h, --help Print help -V, --version Print version ```