How can I generate an MD5 sum for a folder on Windows?

Question

There are several posts about generating MD5 sums for files and/or folders on various Windows platforms. However, none of these worked for me. I tried:

• Windows CertUtil: CertUtil -hashfile myFileName MD5 returns "Access is denied" on all folders (my cmd is running with admin privileges),
• HashTab: does not show up in the Properties dialog in Explorer as advertised,
• Summer Properties: does not show up in the Properties dialog either,
• HashCheck: does not allow MD5 for folders, only files,
• md5checker: does not compute the MD5 of the entire folder (only files in it).

At this point I am starting to get a bit desperate. Please note that I am using Windows 7 x64.

For info, if possible, I am trying to find a tool that would allow something like this in Linux:

find DIR -type f -exec md5sum {} \; | sort -k 2 | md5sum

Answer 1

None of these quite did what I needed so I came up with this alternative...

@echo off
for /R . %%f in (*.*) do (
    echo | set/p="%%f - "
    certutil -hashfile "%%f" MD5 | findstr /V ":"
)

Outputs in the format "<Path><Filename> - <Hash>" at one line per file.

Answer 2

If you want to use a GUI, I can recommend Fsum Frontend.

Fsum Frontend is a free and easy-to-use tool that allows to compute message digests, checksums and HMACs for files and text strings. It supports drag-and-drop and you can handle multiple files at once. The checksum generated can be used to verify the integrity of the files.

It supports 96 algorithms: [...] md5 [...]

---

As the name implies, Fsum Frontend is a GUI for (among others) SlavaSoft fsum.

A fast and handy command line utility for file integrity verification. It offers a choice of 13 of the most popular hash and checksum functions for file message digest and checksum calculation.

Its features include:

• Possibility to act recursively. FSUM can operate not only on files from a specific directory, but also on files from all subdirectories of the specified directory;
• Work with large size files. (Tested on file sizes of up to 15 GB);
• Full compatibility with md5sum utility

Answer 3

You can achieve the equivalent to your Unix command (minus the sorting) with the following:

for /R . %f in (*.*) do @certutil -hashfile "%f" MD5

You can change the dot (.) for whatever folder you want to recurse from, and the *.* to whatever file mask you need in order to narrow down your file set.

Answer 4

PowerShell provides loop statement, some people may prefer this syntax

foreach($f in dir){ certutil -hashfile "$f" md5}

Reference: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/PowerShell/Loops

Answer 5

HashCheck Shell Extension (archive) can be used to get a hash of a directory. This can be done by:

1. Using HashCheck on the directory.
2. This will generate a .md5 file which contains a listing of the hashes of each file in that directory, including all files in sub-directories.
3. Use HashCheck again on the .md5 file it generated above.
4. This final generated .md5 file contains a hash of the entire directory.

Answer 6

Late to the question but finding only unaccepted answers here is what I have found:

function Get-FolderHash ($folder) {
 dir $folder -Recurse | ?{!$_.psiscontainer} | %{[Byte[]]$contents += [System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes($_.fullname)}
 $hasher = [System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1]::Create()
 [string]::Join("",$($hasher.ComputeHash($contents) | %{"{0:x2}" -f $_}))
}

Copy and paste this code to PowerShell console and type:

Get-FolderHash "C:\CustomFolder"

Runtime may vary depending on folder contents.

Answer 7

If you have Python 3 installed, you could use my pyfstools package for that. Quick usage:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/sorgloomer/pyfstools.git@main
...
$ python -m pyfstools hash --algo md5 .
dir 88c17b149c1d9fef50f642b698cef9e6

Answer 8

I wrote a cross-platform CLI package for getting a hash of a file or directory.

It uses the blake3 cryptographic algorithm.

paq can hash very large directories or files.