SOSysAdmin - How to get the hash of a file on Windows

How to get the hash of a file on Windows

flag Scope

Computing the hash of a file on a Windows machine.

construction How-to

To compute the hash of a file on Windows we can use the Get-FileHash cmdlet on PowerShell.

Open a PowerShell
Execute the following command:

Get-FileHash C:\path\to\file.txt -Algorithm MD5 | Format-List

Where:

C:\path\to\file.txt is the path of the file you want to get hash from
MD5 is the cryptographic hash function used for computing the hash value of the file. It can be one of those:

SHA1
SHA256
SHA386
SHA512
MD5

You will get the hash in a format like this:


                        Algorithm : MD5
                        Hash      : D41D8CD98F00B204E9800998ECF8427E
                        Path      : C:\path\to\file.txt

file.txt

D41D8CD98F00B204E9800998ECF8427E

school Further considerations

If the -Algorithm parameter is omitted or it has no value specified, the default algorithm used will be SHA256.
You can read more about the Get-FileHash cmdlet on the Microsoft official documentation

Article ID: SYS-WIN-0006