SUM(1) General Commands Manual SUM(1)

sum — print checksum and block count of a file (LEGACY)

sum [-r][file ...]

The sum utility calculates and writes a checksum for the named file to standard output and also writes the space used by the file, in 512-byte units.

The sum utility supports the XBD specification, . The following options are supported:

Use an alternative algorithm in computing the checksum.

The following operands are supported:

file
A pathname of a file. If no files are named, the standard input is read.

The standard input is any type of file, used only if no file operands are specified.

The input files are of any file type.

The following environment variables may affect the execution of sum :

Provide a default value for the internationalisation variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the implementation-dependent default locale will be used. If any of the internationalisation variables contains an invalid setting, the utility will behave as if none of the variables had been defined.
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalisation variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single- as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
Determine the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

Default.

For each file processed successfully, sum writes a line of the following format:

"%u %d %s\n", <checksum>, <number of 512-byte units>, <pathname>

If the standard input is used for input, the pathname is omitted.

Used only for diagnostic messages.

None.

None.

The following exit values are returned:

Successful completion.
An error occurred.

Default.

It is not clear that the algorithms used in typical implementations are portable, that is, the same checksum might not be produced for the same input on different systems. Portable applications should use cksum(1) .

None.

None.

cksum(1) .

February 1997 posix.fail