MX Linux Forum

I want to copy / transfer files from location to another then verify the files were copied correctly.

One technique to verify if a group of files has been copied correctly to another location would be to:
1) Create a archive of the files ... (tar, cpio or bz - whatever)
2) Create a md5sum for the archive then copy or transfer the archive to the new location.
3) Then create a new md5sum for the archive in the new location.
4) Use diff to compare the 2 md5sum files.

Can cp or another command be used to accomplish this task.
I need to copy all files in the specified directory and sub-directories.

Thanks in advance for any advice / suggestions offered.

Tom
Naturally nuts no pharmaceuticals required

rsync checks md5 of the copied files use that, it also gives you nice option to update the copied files without having to copy all the stuff again.

If rsync together with md5-checksum does not fit into your file-transfer scenario
an alternative approach would be to recursively create a checksum file of that directory tree
and transfer this checksum file with the transfered files itself.
For checking file transfer success shortly after it took place
md5-checksum might sufficient. But as md5 does have a well-known collusion security-issue
I would not recommend using it for anything else. I.e. if you are going to verify
the checksum long time after the file transfer took place a better approach migth be to use sha256.
To use the more collusion-robust sha256 in combination with creating a hashsum tree
here en axample: Happy hashing