Create An MD5 Hash Of A Text String
From RZWiki
To create an MD5 hash (aka digest or checksum) of a text string on Linux platforms, you'll need to combine two commands in one of two ways, as follows;
echo -n text_string | openssl dgst -md5
Usage Examples
echo -n text_string | md5sum
0e7d8b2122772a0c30c762d7bc06dd43 -
The - part of the output simply indicates the input was standard input rather than a file.
echo -n text_string | openssl dgst -md5
0e7d8b2122772a0c30c762d7bc06dd43
Usage Notes
The hash will change if the case of any part of the text string changes; in other words, the input is case sensitive.
The -n option prevents the echo command default behaviour of outputting a trailing newline, which would become part of the input to the sha1sum or dgst commands and result in an incorrect hash/digest being generated.
Why the two commands don't directly support text string input I don't know.
To generate SHA1 hashes/digests, you can replace the md5sum command with the sha1sum command
To generate MD2, MD4, SHA, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, MDC2 or RIPEMD160 hashes/digests using the OpenSSL dgst command simply replace the -md5 option with the appropriate algorithm name, as listed here.
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