It does what I need…

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People have asked: no, I am not presently working on ExactFile. It does what I need, and I have been too busy with other projects to spend time advancing the feature set.

No, I will not open-source it. Two reasons: 1. I am using proprietary third party components so nothing I give you would compile for you unless you wanted to buy them. 2. Even if you did, my own private modifications to those, which I cannot legally distribute, would probably make it too hard to use.

ExactFile is being used by thousands of people and that is cool. A handful of those people have made small donations and I appreciate that. Thanks! But I do not foresee future development happening.

There is one bug a few people run into, which I am sorry I will not be fixing. If you are using file names with characters that are encoded with different normalization than what Windows does when UTF-16 is converted to UTF-8, then ExactFile will not be able to find your file when it loads the digest, and will report that it is not there, even if it is. The only reliable way to fix this would be to change the digest file format to be UTF-16 instead of UTF-8. This issue is very rare and affects very few people, but alas, it is there nonetheless. Sorry.

Further development: not much.

Just in case you’re wondering…

The reason ExactFile hasn’t had an update in such a long time is that it does everything I need it to do. There are some more things I’d like to do with it, but other projects (that pay) always win out.  I don’t see this changing any time soon.  Enjoy it “as it is” for the time being. 🙂

My previous blog post indicated future development “soon.” I take it back. Future development “when I have time” is more like it. 🙂

exf 1.0.1.6 released

A new build of the console application exf has been posted.

Version 1.0.1.6 (download, info) fixes problems with batch files.

Due to the way Windows handles Unicode output in consoles, exf was “terminating” batch files any time exf was called from a batch file. The only way I could find to fix this problem was to have exf revert the output mode to ANSI after the work is complete. What this means is that visually, Unicode characters in the console window will appear as boxes, but the actual data is still being written as Unicode. So, if you are redirecting output to a file, nothing is lost as the output is still UTF-8. It’s only what appears in the console window that is altered.

Anyway, this means you can now use exf properly in a batch file. Yay!

ExactFile 1.0.0.15 Released

Another ExactFile update ready for download.

This update completes the Windows “open with” support.

The installer will offer to associate ExactFile with the following file extensions:

  • .exf
  • .md5
  • .sha1
  • .sfv

Don’t worry, you can opt not to do this. And if you uninstall (why would you?) the file assocations are removed.

Basically this means that ExactFile accepts a single command-line argument, which is expected to be a digest file. By assoicating the above extensions with ExactFile, you can simply double-click them in Windows Explorer and they’ll be validated by ExactFile. Also, the Explorer “Open With…” dialog will allow you to easily associate file extensions with ExactFile, so if you have some other extension you’re using, like maybe .crc32, it’ll work.

Technical detail: ExactFile doesn’t really care what the file extension is. A sha1sum checksum digest could be called “checksums.md5” and ExactFile is smart enough to figure out that they are indeed sha1 sums, not md5 sums. As long as the content of the digest file matches one of the supported formats, it’ll work.

ExactFile 1.0.0.12 released

A new beta of ExactFile is available for download.

A help file has been added.

The Create TestFiles Applet function has been implemented.  This update makes FileCheckMD5 completely obsolete. From the help file:

The Create TestFile Applet function makes it easy to provide a simple way for a user to test all of the files on a CD or DVD. This function creates a digest file much like the Create Digest function, but goes one step further: it also writes a small (less than 400K) “TestFiles.exe” application in the same folder. When the TestFiles applet (applet = tiny application) is executed, it automatically loads the digest file and immediately starts testing the files. The TestFiles application is multi-threaded* and responsive to user input even while scanning files on slow media and can be closed instantly if desired. TestFiles shows an easy-to-understand report (such as “Every file is ok”, etc).

The intended usage of this function is for you to build your deployment folder, then run the Create TestFile Applet function on that folder. Two files are added to the folder: TestFiles.exe and checksums.exf. The entire folder can then be burned to CD.  From that point, running TestFiles automatically initiates file testing.

The TestFiles.exe application is “read only” in the sense that it cannot generate digest files. It merely reads the digest file created by ExactFile, compares the checksums to the files in the folder and subfolders, and reports.

ExactFile 1.0.0.10 released

The first public beta version of ExactFile is now available for download. For details on ExactFile, see the ExactFile home page.

This beta release is mostly functional. The file checksum, digest generation, digest testing, and hash benchmark functions are all quite usable.

The following planned major features are currently not implemented:

  • Help file (not that you need one, right?)
  • TestFiles Applet creation
  • Windows “Open With” support

I will be updating this web site over the next few days to explain the various features of ExactFile. For now, I just wanted to get the beta posted.

Here are some screen shots:

A note to FileCheckMD5 users:

If you use FileCheckMD5’s “portable” functionality (for CDs, USB memory sticks, etc), you will want to keep FileCheckMD5 around for that purpose (until the Create TestFile Applet feature is implemented). ExactFile can generate FileCheckMD5-compatible digest files, so you can still use it to make your checkfiles. This is fairly trivial — just load up ExactFile, click the Create Digest page, and set your target folder and the digest type to fcmd5. Make sure FileCheckMD5 is in the target folder as well, and you’re good to go.

exf 1.0.0.4 beta posted

A quick update to exf today: 1.0.0.4. Mike C. reported incompatibility with exf’s sha1 output style and gnu sha1sum.  I’ve changed exf to use gnu style output.

exf uses a series of regular expressions to parse input files without the user having to specify what kind of hash routine is being used, and these have been updated so that you can feed exf either gnu/linux sha1sum digests or the stripped-down Windows sha1sum digest formats.  Anyway, it should “just work.”

exf 1.0.0.3 Beta posted

I’ve posted an update to exf. You can download version 1.0.0.3. Here’s what’s new:

  • Adjustments to file reading code.
  • Fixed hidden files not getting scanned.
  • Added -fp switch to include full path in digest output.
  • Console output includes number of files hashed.

Work on ExactFile GUI continues…

Online, finally

I thought yesterday would be the day, but no, it’s today.

I’ve got the rudimentaries of a software website online now.  I’m not real pleased with this WordPress template I’m using, so I’ll have to pick a better “CMS-style” template when I have the time.

Anyway, download exf and give it a whirl.  Let me know how it works for you.

Website launched – What’s this all about?

Welcome.

Back in 2003 I developed a program I called FileCheckMD5. It solved a little problem I had: customers couldn’t tell me if their CD-ROM was defective or damaged, and I had to do a lot of guesswork to find out if their CD-ROM was bad or if the installation program wasn’t functioning on their computer for a different reason.

There were of course various file integrity scanners out there, but at the time, I could not find anything that was both graphical (so non-techinical users could easily interpret the information) and properly suited for the task of checking an entire CD (subdirectories and all). So I just wrote my own which used the MD5 hash method, and called it FileCheckMD5.

I released it as freeware thinking one or two other people might find it useful for the same things.

That was hundreds of thousands of downloads ago.

Over that time, I’ve built up quite a wish-list of features and a few bugs.

I decided it was time to develop a more robust tool – and since this one will offer more than just the MD5 checksum method, the name will be changed from FileCheckMD5 to ExactFile.

ExactFile will be multi-threaded, support Unicode file names, and not choke on extremely large (hundreds of gigabytes) files.

The initial beta version of the console application, exf, is already done. This one is for folks happy on the command prompt. The full GUI ExactFile is still in the works and will be available soon.

Today I figured it was time to get this thing posted online so others could use it. If you’re already using a command line summer like md5sum, sha1sum, or fsum, exf is something you’ll want to try. As I said, it’s multi-threaded, so when you’re hashing more than one file, those extra cores in your processor will actually get to do something. And although Windows consoles don’t display Unicode characters, exf works fine with Unicode file names and its output doesn’t mangle the file names, either.

Subscribe to this blog if you want to be kept aprised of ExactFile development.

Oh, and I’ve put FileCheckMD5 here just until the GUI ExactFile is ready to be used.