Package of the Day: cfv – Hash check your torrent downloads whereever they may be
Today I discovered app-arch/cfv in the Gentoo tree. In addition to all the usual md5, sha1, etc formats, install the net-p2p/bittornado package (gtk use flag not required) and this utility can also handle hash checking against .torrent files, without the overhead of launching a full blown torrent client and then having to make sure said client can find all the files.
This is useful to me as I torrent on a remote server and download the files over SFTP/FTPS. Very occasionally something can go awry and I have the desire to hash check the files to see if it was an error with the original or something in my copy that perhaps occurred during transit.
With cfv, I can instead simply store the .torrent file alongside the files and then, when I want to check the files, run “cfv -f foo.torrent“
I used to use cfv for all of my sfv needs ; anime tends to be checksummed using SFV.
At some point, I installed cksfv for some reason. The speed difference is incredible! cksfv beats cfv hands down (at least for SFVing). [this testing was done 2+ years ago]
Still, .torrent hashing is a pretty killer feature that I didn’t know about – maybe it’s newer than my experience