2.1.4.1 Verifying the MD5 Checksum

After you have downloaded a MySQL package, you should make sure that its MD5 checksum matches the one provided on the MySQL download pages. Each package has an individual checksum that you can verify against the package that you downloaded. The correct MD5 checksum is listed on the downloads page for each MySQL product; you should compare it against the MD5 checksum of the file (product) that you download.

Each operating system and setup offers its own version of tools for checking the MD5 checksum. Typically the command is named md5sum, or it may be named md5, and some operating systems do not ship it at all. On Linux, it is part of the GNU Text Utilities package, which is available for a wide range of platforms. You can also download the source code from http://www.gnu.org/software/textutils/. If you have OpenSSL installed, you can use the command openssl md5 package_name instead. A Windows implementation of the md5 command line utility is available from http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/. winMd5Sum is a graphical MD5 checking tool that can be obtained from http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/winmd5sum. Our Microsoft Windows examples assume the name md5.exe.

Linux and Microsoft Windows examples:

$> md5sum mysql-standard-9.1.0-linux-i686.tar.gz
aaab65abbec64d5e907dcd41b8699945  mysql-standard-9.1.0-linux-i686.tar.gz

$> md5.exe mysql-installer-community-9.1.0.msi
aaab65abbec64d5e907dcd41b8699945  mysql-installer-community-9.1.0.msi

You should verify that the resulting checksum (the string of hexadecimal digits) matches the one displayed on the download page immediately below the respective package.

Note

Make sure to verify the checksum of the archive file (for example, the .zip, .tar.gz, or .msi file) and not of the files that are contained inside of the archive. In other words, verify the file before extracting its contents.