Create md5 sum files in Linux

Learned that the Linux shell can be quickly used to generate md5 checksums of an entire directory to an md5 file, the command is of the form:

cd [directory to generate check sums for]
find ./ -printf “%p\0” | xargs -0 -n 1 md5sum > ./checksums.md5

Then, to check the files in a new location (e.g. on a CD-ROM), use the command:

md5sum -c ./checksums.md5

Or there are other programs for validating the files with the checksums, like wxChecksums which is available for Windows.

I wanted this because the graphical wxChecksums was too difficult to compile, and didn't seem worth the effort. Although I'm sure a couple backwards-compatibility packages for gcc would fix this problem, the command-line method makes it straightforward for doing multiple check sums in a single command in text mode.