title: Generating one MD5/SHA1 checksum of multiple files in Python
body: <p>I have looked through several topics about calculating checksums of files in Python but none of them answered the question about one sum from multiple files. I have several files in sub directories and would like to determine if there was any change in one or more of them.
  Is there a way to generate one sum from multiple files?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:
  This is the way I do it to get a list of sums:</p>
  
  <pre><code>checksums = [(fname, hashlib.md5(open(fname, 'rb').read()).digest()) for fname in flist]
  </code></pre>