.TH SUMMER "1" "December 2006" "Debian" "Chiark-utils-bin"
.SH NAME
summer \- print checksum and system metainformation for files
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B summer -ACDbfhqt
.RI [\| startpoint ...]
.br
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B summer
prints the MD5 checksum of the contents, and the system
metainformation (ownership, permissions, timestamps, etc.), for a
file, or recursively for a whole directory tree.

Each command line argument should be a file or directory to be processed;
if it is a directory then it will be processed and then its contents will
also be processed, recursively. If no
.IR startpoint s
are specified on the command line then
.B summer
will read a list of newline-separated startpoints from standard input.

Since
.B summer
correctly handles devices, FIFOs and other non-regular files it is useful
for generating and comparing summaries of arbitrary directory trees where
md5sum alone would not be.
.SH OUTPUT FORMAT
.B summer
prints one line of information for each filesystem object it processes.
Each line has the following columns:
.TS
tab (@);
l l.
@MD5sum or file type information
@Size of file in bytes
@File access rights (in octal)
@User ID of owner
@Group ID of owner
@atime (time of last access)
@mtime (time of last modification)
@ctime (time of last status change)
@Filename
.TE

For regular files, the first column is the MD5sum. For directories, pipes,
symlinks and sockets it is the literal string `dir', `pipe', `symlink' or `socket'
as appropriate. For devices it begins with `c' for character or `b' for block
devices, followed by the device number as a single 32 bit hex number and as
four separate 8 bit hex numbers.

Note that certain characters in the filename (including spaces and `\\' characters)
are escaped using
.B \\\x\c
.I NN
syntax, where
.I NN
are two hex digits. This makes the output unambiguous. Filenames will be relative
if the relevant
.I startpoint
was relative, and absolute if it was absolute.
For symlinks the filename
column includes an indication of the target of the link.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-A
Do not print the atime (time of last access). The `atime' column will be omitted.
.TP
.B \-C
Do not print the ctime (time of last status change). The `ctime' column will be omitted.
.TP
.B \-D
Do not print directory sizes. The `size' column for directories will read `dir'.
.TP
.B \-b
Do not print mtime (time of last modification) for symbolic links. The `mtime' field
for symbolic links will read `link'.
.TP
.B \-f
Include information about errors encountered (for example, unreadable files)
in the output, and continue processing. The default is to print error information
to standard error and stop immediately an error is encountered.
.TP
.B \-h
Print a brief usage message (and do nothing else).
.TP
.B \-q
Suppress the progress information which
.B summer
normally prints to standard error.
.TP
.B \-t
Set the field separator between the information and the filename to a
tab character (default is space).
.SH BUGS
.B summer
requires switches to be specified in a single argument; that is,
.B -ACf
is accepted but
.B -A -C -f
is not.
.SH AUTHOR
This Manual page was written by Peter Maydell <pmaydell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> but
may be used by anyone.
.SH COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
.br
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.