Krade’s WebLog

If you’re a weaboo, odds are that you have tons of animu laying around in your Hard Disk. Many (if not most) fansubbing groups append a hex number to the filename of their releases — this a CRC32 checksum, a checksum calculated from the contents of your file. If your file somehow got corrupted or is a incomplete download or whatever, the CRC checksum you calculate from that file isn’t going to match the one on the filename. This is usually accomplished by checking md5 hashes instead, but md5 hashes are way too big to fit in a (sane) filename.

I watch my animu on a Mac (yay for Perian) because I really like the lappy screen and Front Row is quite nice. However, I couldn’t find a way to easily calculate a CRC checksum on a Mac in the same way Windows does it, so I wrote a bash function to help me calculate those values:

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