How to get an MD5 checksum in PowerShell

Question

I would like to calculate an MD5 checksum of some content. How do I do this in PowerShell?

Answer 1

This site has an example: Using Powershell for MD5 Checksums. It uses the .NET framework to instantiate an instance of the MD5 hash algorithm to calculate the hash.

Here's the code from the article, incorporating Stephen's comment:

param
(
  $file
)

$algo = [System.Security.Cryptography.HashAlgorithm]::Create("MD5")
$stream = New-Object System.IO.FileStream($Path, [System.IO.FileMode]::Open,
    [System.IO.FileAccess]::Read)

$md5StringBuilder = New-Object System.Text.StringBuilder
$algo.ComputeHash($stream) | % { [void] $md5StringBuilder.Append($_.ToString("x2")) }
$md5StringBuilder.ToString()

$stream.Dispose()