mjhjmtu

I'm trying to store the MD5 of a variable into another variable. Between backticks and the more modern () notation, I cannot figure out how to assign the value of a variable run through a command to another variable. Sample code:

#!/bin/bash
backup_dir=$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)
hashed=$( $backup_dir | md5)

Here, the hashed variable doesn't work, it takes the literal string backup_dir and hashes that. So the hash is always the same. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

You are expecting md5 to read the value of the backup_dir variable and return its MD5 hash sum.

The command pipeline

$backup_dir | md5

would try to run $backup_dir as a command, piping its output to md5. I would expect a "command not found" error from this, along with the MD5 hash of the empty string (d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e) in $hashed.

Instead, you would need to use something like

printf '%s' "$backup_dir" | md5

to give md5 the value on its standard input stream.

You could also use echo "$backup_dir" | md5 or md5 <<<"$backup_dir", but note that this adds a newline to the end of the value of $backup_dir which would alter the hash.

If md5 is the md5 utility commonly found on BSD and BSD-like systems (e.g. macOS), then you should use

md5 -q -s "$backup_dir"

The -s option takes a string as its argument, and -q causes md5 to only print out the hash of that string and nothing else.

Summary:

#!/bin/bash
backup_dir=$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)
hashed=$(md5 -q -s "$backup_dir")