HashSum

C++ program written almost entirely by ChatGPT 4.0 to calculate the hash of files in a given directory and its subdirectories and outputing the resulat in a format similar to SHASUM tool. The program is designed to be fast and efficient, taking advantage of multi-threading to process multiple files in parallel.

Features

• Computes hash for all files in a given directory and its subdirectories
• Verifies the hash of files against values stored in a given SUM file
• Supports various hash algorithms, including SHA256 (default), SHA1, SHA512, MD5, etc.
• Multithreaded implementation for faster processing on systems with multiple CPU cores
• Can handle both file and directory input paths
• Outputs the hash and relative file paths in a user-friendly format
• Can write the output to a file or print it to the terminal

Implementation

The program uses C++17 features and the following libraries:

• Standard Library <filesystem> for directory traversal and file manipulation
• Native API for hashing on Windows and macOS
• OpenSSL for hashing on Linux

A custom thread pool implementation is used to manage and distribute the work among multiple threads.

Building and Running on Linux, macOS, and Windows

Prerequisites

• A C++17 compliant compiler (GCC, Clang, or MSVC)
• Linux Only: OpenSSL development libraries
• CMake (version 3.10 or later)

Building

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/chatgptdev/HashSum.git
cd HashSum

2. Create a build directory and run CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

3. Build the project:

cmake --build .

Running

After building the project, you can run the program with the following command:

./hashSum [input_path] [-a hash_algorithm] [-o output_path] [-v sumfile_path] [-help]

• input_path: The path to the directory or file you want to compute the hash for (mandatory)
• hash_algorithm: The hash algorithm to use, e.g., "SHA256", "SHA1", "SHA512", "MD5" (optional, default: "SHA256")
• output_path: The path to the file where the output will be written (optional, if not specified, the output will be printed to the terminal)
• sumfile_path: The path to the file containing the expected hash values (optional, if specified, the program will compare the computed hash values with the expected values and print the result)
• help: Print the help message

Example:

./hashSum /path/to/directory -a SHA256 -o output.txt
./hashSum /path/to/directory -a SHA256 -v sumfile.txt