Verify a Checksum in Windows

A lot of vendors that provide software online provide a checksum for the file that helps you verify that what you downloaded hasn't been altered in some way. Sometimes that's an MD5 or SHA256.

I recently discovered a tool that's part of windows that helps you generate the checksum of a given file - certutil.

Usage is pretty simple, just open a terminal and enter the following:

certutil -hashfile "Path/To/File.Ext" MD5

You can replace MD5 in the line above with any of the following:

• MD2
• MD4
• MD4
• SHA1
• SHA256
• SHA384
• SHA512