title: Need suggestion for faster Linux fingerprint/hash comparison
body: <p>I'm currently using the linux md5sum command in a bash script on a very lightweight (low processor/low memory) linux device to return and record the checksums on thousands of similarly-named 32MB files in a single directory.</p>
  
  <pre><code>md5sum ./file* &gt;fingerprint.txt
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The next day, I repeat the process on the same set of files and programmatically compare the results from the prior day's hashes.  When I find that the fingerprint of a file has changed between day1 and day2 I take action on that specific file.  If the file remained unchanged I take no action and continue my comparison.</p>
  
  <p>The problem that I'm running into is that the md5 method takes a LONG time to process on each file.  The comparison needs to be completed within a certain time-frame and I'm starting to bump into incidents where the entire process simply takes too long.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some other method/tool I could be using to reliably perform this kind of comparison?  (note, it's not adequate enough to perform a date comparison on the files and the file sizes remain a constant 32MB)</p>