VeriTAR checks Tar Archive checksums of files.
Assuming that your files to backup reside within the myfiles/ subdirectory, the name of the tar archive will be mybackup.tar and the name of the file containing the md5sums will be mybackup.md5. You can use any tar switch for the creation of the archive except for -C which should be avoided. If you need to change to another directory, do it using cd; otherwise, no md5 sums will be recorded.
Note that it is important to include the -v (--verbose) switch when invoking tar so that the paths are printed to stdout and can be processed by xargs. In the xargs statement, the -I '{}' part indicates that the '{}' string will be replaced by the path that is passed to xargs through the pipe.
The sh -c "test -f '{}' && md5sum '{}'" statement does two things: tests if the path ('{}') is a file and calculates the md5 sum for it. In the last part, tee is used in order to print the md5sum to the stdout and also to the mybackup.md5 file. Once the operation ends, two files will be created: mybackup.tar and mybackup.md5.
Usage of VeriTAR is simple; users simply run the command " veritar [options] tar_archive checksum_file" followed by the desired options. The checksum file format should be 'md5sum path'. A number of command line options are available, including --version to display the version number, -h or --help to view program instructions, -v or --verbose to print all messages, -q or --quiet to show only checksum errors, and -n or --no-warn to suppress warnings.
Various changes have been made in the latest software release, including a code redesign, translation of TAR member types, minor fixes, and the addition of command line options for message detail. The program now processes only TAR members that are 'regular files'. Additional features include counters and summary, a timer, an installation script, and a launch script.
Version 0.3.0: N/A