How to compute the MD5 or SHA-1 cryptographic hash values for a file

When you apply the hashing algorithm to an arbitrary amount of data, such as a binary file, the result is a hash or a message digest. This hash has a fixed size. MD5 is a hashing algorithm that creates a 128-bit hash value. SHA-1 is a hashing algorithm that creates a 160-bit hash value.

You can use the File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV) utility to compute the MD5 or SHA-1 cryptographic hash values of a file. For additional information about the File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV) utility, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: To compute the MD5 and the SHA-1 hash values for a file, type the following command at a command line:For example, to compute the MD5 and SHA-1 hash values for the Shdocvw.dll file in your %Systemroot%\System32 folder, type the following command: