After you have downloaded a MySQL package, you should make sure
that its MD5 checksum matches the one provided on the MySQL
download pages. Each package has an individual checksum that you
can verify with the following command, where
package_name is the name of the
package you downloaded:
shell> md5sum package_name
Example:
shell> md5sum mysql-standard-5.5.9-linux-i686.tar.gz
aaab65abbec64d5e907dcd41b8699945 mysql-standard-5.5.9-linux-i686.tar.gz
You should verify that the resulting checksum (the string of hexadecimal digits) matches the one displayed on the download page immediately below the respective package.
Make sure to verify the checksum of the archive
file (for example, the .zip or
.tar.gz file) and not of the files that
are contained inside of the archive.
Note that not all operating systems support the
md5sum command. On some, it is simply called
md5, and others do not ship it at all. On
Linux, it is part of the GNU Text
Utilities package, which is available for a wide
range of platforms. You can download the source code from
http://www.gnu.org/software/textutils/ as well.
If you have OpenSSL installed, you can use the command
openssl md5
package_name instead. A
Windows implementation of the md5 command
line utility is available from
http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/.
winMd5Sum is a graphical MD5 checking tool
that can be obtained from
http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/winmd5sum.