How to calculate the MD5 hash of a large file in C?

c, hash, md5

Solution

example

`gcc -g -Wall -o file file.c -lssl -lcrypto`

#include <stdio.h>
#include <openssl/md5.h>

int main()
{
    unsigned char c[MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH];
    char *filename="file.c";
    int i;
    FILE *inFile = fopen (filename, "rb");
    MD5_CTX mdContext;
    int bytes;
    unsigned char data[1024];

    if (inFile == NULL) {
        printf ("%s can't be opened.\n", filename);
        return 0;
    }

    MD5_Init (&mdContext);
    while ((bytes = fread (data, 1, 1024, inFile)) != 0)
        MD5_Update (&mdContext, data, bytes);
    MD5_Final (c,&mdContext);
    for(i = 0; i < MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH; i++) printf("%02x", c[i]);
    printf (" %s\n", filename);
    fclose (inFile);
    return 0;
}

result:

$ md5sum file.c
25a904b0e512ee546b3f47574703d9fc  file.c
$ ./file
25a904b0e512ee546b3f47574703d9fc file.c

Problem

I am writing in C using OpenSSL library. How can I calculate hash of a large file using md5? As I know, I need to load a whole file to RAM as char array and then call the hash function. But what if the file is about 4Gb long? Sounds like a bad idea. SOLVED: Thanks to askovpen, I found my bug. I've used ``` while ((bytes = fread (data, 1, 1024, inFile)) != 0) MD5_Update (&mdContext, data, 1024); ``` not ``` while ((bytes = fread (data, 1, 1024, inFile)) != 0) MD5_Update (&mdContext, data, bytes); ```

Original source