Creating a shell script to traverse a file system and hash every file

Question

I need to create a shell script that will traverse my entire file system, hash each file, and write it into a text database.

I will be doing this on Ubuntu 12.04 and using md5sum and, if we are being honest here, I don't even know where to begin. Any and all help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

This may take some time to compute:

find / -type f -exec md5sum {} + >my_database.md5

How it works

• find

  find is a utility that can traverse entire filesystems

• /

  This tells find to start at the root of the filesystem.

• -type f

  This tells find to find only regular files

• -exec md5sum {} +

  This tells find to run md5sum on each of the files found.

• >my_database.md5

  This tells the shell to redirect the output from the command to a file.