Comparing Files(Checksum) On Windows

Recently, I needed to compare two DLLs with the same name to see if they were the same. However, my existing Unix knowledge was useless as I do not have the Ubuntu subsystem installed.

So I did what any engineer in my position would do, I asked my more experienced peers.

A Principal Engineer @ work gave me some guidance. They introduced me to a PowerShell utility named Get-FileHash which was exactly what I was looking for.

In my scenario a user had a version of a .DLL installed on their machine of which I needed to ensure was a specific version. Knowing about Get-FileHash allows me to ask the customer to perform the following command and message us the results.

PS > Get-FileHash .\sapnco.dll

Algorithm       Hash                                                                   Path
---------       ----                                                                   ----
SHA256          E79E3BC34494C5F9102FBFA61AED2B2177A58CB0DE16B812AD0AAF9B6BA3261F       C:\...\sapnco.dll

Then I went ahead and performed the command on my own machine and verified the hashes matched.

Extra TidBit - Checksum On Linux

ubuntu@ip-x-x-x-x:~/app$ sha1sum docker-compose.yml
2571e3153b90517693c2dfc5668746296023ccda  docker-compose.yml

Enjoy!


Posted on 2022-12-15