AxSum : Calculate MD5 Checksum of Multiple Files

Axantum is a software development firm best known for their easy-to-use file encryption tool AxCrypt. This tool can add itself to the context-menu of the File Explorer on Windows. After that we can right-click on any file and choose to encrypt it. For encryption, AxCrypt uses the strong AES 256 bit cipher which ensures that nobody can decrypt the files encrypted by AxCrypt without supplying the correct password or passphrase.

The same developers are offering a command line tool called AxSum which can be used to find the MD5 checksum for any number of files. This tool is built to be run natively on Windows which means it is independent of any runtimes or frameworks. Furthermore AxSum is also very fast since it is designed using native Win32 API.

AxSum

Using AxSum is extremely easy too. The only command line parameter is the file for which you want to find out the MD5 checksum. For example, if you want to calculate the MD5 checksum for C:\Windows\Notepad.exe then the command line would be something like

AxSum.exe C:\Windows\Notepad.exe

This is perhaps the easiest file hashing tool out there. Similar to finding the checksum for a single file, we can find the checksum for multiple files. In that case, we can supply space separated files as parameters. For example, if we want to find MD5 checksum for drink.txt and food.txt, then the command would be like this:

AxSum.exe drink.txt food.txt

When finding the checksum of only one file, it does not display the filename in the output. When calculating the checksum of multiple files, it displays the checksum against the names of the respective files.

Even though MD5 is now considered vulnerable, it is still good for quick verification of smaller files. For example, we can use it to see whether two similar files are identical or different. Instead of reading two text files and comparing word by word, we can compare their MD5 hashes and see if they are identical or not. They are identical if their MD5 checksum is the same.

You can download AxSum from https://www.axantum.com/downloads.