Command Line Kung Fu

Recently I had to migrate hard drives, due to a disappointing Samsung Spinfoint F3 hard drive failure (this is the second Samsung F3 1TB hard drive that I've had, thats gone on to meet its maker). This drive wasn't fully dead, and I figured I'd take what I could whilst it was on its last leg. Thanks in part due to Amazons speedy delivery of  a 2TB Seagate Barracuda Eco-Green Sata 3 (6Gb/s) drive.

Now in my opinion, windows copy and paste, just doesn't cut it for copying large files. It may say it has copied the files but I have had MD5 hashes fail before, and given that this hard drive wasn't performing optimally I just didnt want to risk copying and then pasting corrupt data. I usually prefer copying from the command line as I find it a bit more effective.

There are win32 versions of md5 hash checking programs available, but doing singular hash checks sucks when you have multiple files in multiple folders, hidden in multiple depths. I needed a recursive program to check md5 sums for files with certain extensions only... hmmmn.

Batch file with some sort of for loop? Nah, since every windows box I have has a copy of the excellent cygwin program installed, why not go all out and do it the linux way? I mean I have the Bash shell, with a whole load of unix utilies installed on the computer, including md5sum; So ladies and gentlemen, I now produce below, for your perusal, the extravagant single liner I used to alleviate my problems (not all of them, mind you, I still have to claim on my Samsung's warranty, but this command solved one of my many problems):

#find ./ -maxdepth 5 -type f -name "*.iso" -exec md5sum {} \;

This should ideally be piped into some sort of text file for comparision to the source, to ensure that the files were copied exactly bit-for-bit as opposed to a logical copy. Cygwins 'cp' command outdid windows default file copy routines, since all of the md5 hashes checked out. Attached is a screenshot of the sort of output this command produces. (Click to see enlarged version)

Once again, some awesome Command Line Kung Fu saves the day. Happy new year!

I should point out a few things here:

Cygwin is a great tool, built upon greater tools with some excellent  (and ancient) Unix heritage.

Windows 'just works' most of the time, perhaps the file copy errors were hardware faults (i.e. temperature, seek speeds, time of day) - so this is by no means a comprehensive or fair experiment.

I'm aware there is a utility (with a cygwin port) called md5deep, but it wouldn't search recursively for .iso files. Their 'man' page states 'Please note that recursive mode cannot be used to examine all files of a given file extension'.

And finally Samsungs spinpoint drives have recieved some excellent reviews, I was perhaps unlucky with 2 faulty drives (bought at different times), dont let this put you off Samsungs hard drives, they are an awesome company coming up with some awesome products (foreshame on Apple for trying to stall competition in court by some very underhanded techniques against Samsung).