thash

A fast and versatile terminal hashing program that prints the hash digest to stdout, with many hashing algorithms, many output formats, and support to request the number of iterations for hashing.

This program can be seen as a drop-in replacement for all XXXsum programs on Linux, usage-wise, assuming the defaults are desired.

Why?

Basically I wanted something more flexible than sha256sum, md5sum and the other similar terminal tools. It always helps to have a tool that can do multiple things with hashing, so I spent some time writing a good, reliable program.

Installation

You can install this with cargo.

cargo install thash

Currently it's only available on crates.io with cargo. If it gets popular enough, I'll happily upload it elsewhere.

Usage

Run thash --help, to see all available options, algorithms, etc.

The data input is passed through stdin. This program can be seen as a drop-in replacement for all XXXsum programs on Linux, usage-wise, assuming the defaults are desired.

For platforms that don't have commands like cat to pass a file through stdin, you can use the -f command line argument to specify the file, instead of using stdin. If no -f is specified, stdin will be used.

Examples

Anyway, here are some examples on how to use this program, with the expected outcome:

• Hash the string "abc" using blake2b (the default hashing algorithm), and output the hash digest as hex (default output format).

$ echo -n "abc" | thash
ba80a53f981c4d0d6a2797b69f12f6e94c212f14685ac4b74b12bb6fdbffa2d17d87c5392aab792dc252d5de4533cc9518d38aa8dbf1925ab92386edd4009923

Notice that we use -n with echo to avoid adding a new line at the end.

• Hash the string "abc" using sha256, and output the hash digest as hex. Remember: The list of all available algorithms can be viewed with --help.

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256
ba7816bf8f01cfea414140de5dae2223b00361a396177a9cb410ff61f20015ad

• Same, but now as different types of outputs

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F hex-lower
ba7816bf8f01cfea414140de5dae2223b00361a396177a9cb410ff61f20015ad

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F hex-upper
BA7816BF8F01CFEA414140DE5DAE2223B00361A396177A9CB410FF61F20015AD

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F base64
ungWv48Bz+pBQUDeXa4iI7ADYaOWF3qctBD/YfIAFa0=

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F base64-no-pad
ungWv48Bz+pBQUDeXa4iI7ADYaOWF3qctBD/YfIAFa0

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F base64-url-safe
ungWv48Bz-pBQUDeXa4iI7ADYaOWF3qctBD_YfIAFa0=

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F base64-url-safe-no-pad
ungWv48Bz-pBQUDeXa4iI7ADYaOWF3qctBD_YfIAFa0

You can even write the output as binary with -F binary! Obviously, this isn't properly visible in a text file. But you can pipe it to other programs.

• How about hashing "abc" twice using sha256, instead of once?

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -i2
4f8b42c22dd3729b519ba6f68d2da7cc5b2d606d05daed5ad5128cc03e6c6358

This will take the hash digest output, and hash it again with sha256.

• In fact, this is equivalent to this:

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F binary | thash -a sha256
4f8b42c22dd3729b519ba6f68d2da7cc5b2d606d05daed5ad5128cc03e6c6358

Notice how outputting binary is now useful.

• You can pipe your data through multiple hash functions.

$ echo -n "abc" | thash -a sha256 -F binary | thash -a blake2s -F binary | thash -a sha3-224
c287a7a4abc221b50aa406b6b6e47017f0bb5bc354870912fc00588d

This will hash "abc" with sha256, hash the binary result with blake2s, then hash the binary result with sha3-224, and print the final result.

Performance

thash beats all regular tools, like sha256, b2sum, etc, in performance. On Mac, the performance of thash is even better than shown below, and is faster for everything. However, md5 is the only exception we found, where thash is slower on Linux. Note that this is not gospel, and your machine/OS may behave differently. Feel free to re-run these benchmarks on your computer to evaluate it.

Benchmarking methodology

We use hyperfine for benchmarking. You can install it with cargo install hyperfine, or apt install hyperfine on Debian derivatives, or brew install hyperfine for MacOS, assuming you have homebrew.

To benchmark, first, create a file with random data (below is a 1 GB file), followed by some hashing program to ensure any disk-caching operation in the OS for the file is done:

dd if=/dev/random of=random-file.bin bs=1M count=1024
cat random-file.bin | sha256sum

SHA256 performance

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | thash -a sha256"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | thash -a sha256
  Time (mean ± σ):     670.7 ms ±   9.0 ms    [User: 499.6 ms, System: 589.4 ms]
  Range (min … max):   654.1 ms … 684.2 ms    10 runs

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | sha256sum"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | sha256sum
  Time (mean ± σ):      2.928 s ±  0.050 s    [User: 2.795 s, System: 0.497 s]
  Range (min … max):    2.841 s …  3.016 s    10 runs

SHA512 performance

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | thash -a sha512"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | thash -a sha512
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.653 s ±  0.053 s    [User: 1.491 s, System: 0.629 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.608 s …  1.785 s    10 runs

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | sha512sum"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | sha512sum
  Time (mean ± σ):      2.114 s ±  0.018 s    [User: 1.982 s, System: 0.488 s]
  Range (min … max):    2.088 s …  2.143 s    10 runs

Blake2b performance

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | thash -a blake2b"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | thash -a blake2b
  Time (mean ± σ):     970.0 ms ±  18.7 ms    [User: 796.6 ms, System: 610.0 ms]
  Range (min … max):   951.9 ms … 1011.0 ms    10 runs

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | b2sum"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | b2sum
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.060 s ±  0.020 s    [User: 0.927 s, System: 0.480 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.036 s …  1.093 s    10 runs

SHA-1 sum

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | thash -a sha1"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | thash -a sha1
  Time (mean ± σ):     652.3 ms ±   7.3 ms    [User: 476.8 ms, System: 600.5 ms]
  Range (min … max):   639.8 ms … 662.3 ms    10 runs

$ hyperfine "cat random-file.bin | sha1sum"
Benchmark 1: cat random-file.bin | sha1sum
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.247 s ±  0.029 s    [User: 1.120 s, System: 0.472 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.209 s …  1.288 s    10 runs