SUMMAIN(1)

NAME
summain - gather file checksums and metadata

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION
summain gathers metadata about files, and computes their checksums. It is intended to create a manifest of the files. The manifest can be used to see if something has changed: a new manifest can be created and compared with the old one with diff(1).

The manifest looks like this:

    Name: foo/bar/foobar
    SHA1: 1234123413241324
    Mtime: 2010-01-01 02:08:00.127651 +0000
    Mode: 1755

The filename is URL-encoded to ensure it is purely ASCII. Mode is in octal.

Only some inode fields are included. It does not make sense to compare, for example, the access time, so that is not included.

Time stamps are given using microsecond precision, for the benefit of those filesystems that can support precise timestamps. (Should be nanosecond, but Python return timestamps as floating point, and nanosecond precision is too much for the floating point type.)

The inode and device number fields will not be reported accurately. Instead, they are normalized so that manifests are useful after the files have been restored from backups. Accurate numbers would mean everything seems to have changed. Normalized means that there will be no differences. The numbers are reported so that hard links can be checked.

Directories named on the command line will be recursed automatically.

OPTIONS

EXAMPLE
To make a complete manifest of a directory tree so that you can later verify that nothing at all has changed:

    summain foo > foo.summain

To verify that nothing has changed:

    summain foo > foo.summain-2
    diff -u foo.summain foo.summain-2