After downloading a file from our site, you may want to verify its SHA-256 checksum to ensure the downloaded file’s integrity.
What is an SHA-256 checksum?
You can think of a checksum as a fingerprint of a file.
Here’s an example of a checksum:
f7efd7168f50fd6b574c1d948779ac1cc3d70afcc95c5757ff82f57bfa06b194
Every file has a unique checksum that you can use to ensure its integrity. In other words, you can verify the file’s checksum to ensure the file you downloaded is exactly the file you want and that it was not corrupted or modified in any way.
SHA-256 is a name for one of the hash algorithms you can use to generate a checksum.
What You Need To Remember
There are two things you need to remember while generating checksums of our files:
All checksums in Rublon Downloads are generated using the SHA-256 algorithm. If you use a different algorithm to generate your checksum, e.g. SHA 1, it will produce a different result. Always generate an SHA-256 checksum.
For checksums, capitalization does not matter, e.g. A and a are the same. These two strings are the same checksum:
F7EFD7168F50FD6B574C1D948779AC1CC3D70AFCC95C5757FF82F57BFA06B194
f7efd7168f50fd6b574c1d948779ac1cc3d70afcc95c5757ff82f57bfa06b194
How to verify an SHA-256 checksum?
To verify the SHA-256 checksum of a file, you must generate a checksum of the downloaded file and compare it to the checksum in Rublon Downloads.
Find the instructions below to learn how to generate a checksum of a file on your operating system.
Windows
You can use Command Prompt or PowerShell to generate a SHA-256 checksum on Windows.
Using Command Prompt
1. Press Windows+R to open the Run box
2. Type cmd and click OK.
3. The Command Prompt window will open.
4. Run the following command:
certutil -hashfile C:\file\path\my_file.exe SHA256
Make sure to replace C:\file\path\my_file.exe with the actual path to the file.
5. Compare the generated value to the checksum of the file in Rublon Downloads.
Using Power Shell
1. Press Windows+R to open the Run box
2. Type powershell and click OK.
3. The Windows PowerShell window will open.
4. Run the following command:
Get-FileHash C:\file\path\my_file.exe -Algorithm SHA256
Make sure to replace C:\file\path\my_file.exe with the actual path to the file
5. Compare the generated value to the checksum of the file in Rublon Downloads.
Linux
Every Linux distribution comes with tools for various checksum algorithms. SHA-256 checksum tool is called sha256sum.
1. Go to the directory where your downloaded file is stored, e.g.:
cd home/downloads
2. Use the following command to generate the checksum:
sha256sum my_file.exe
Make sure to replace my_file.exe with the actual name of the file.
3. Compare the generated value to the checksum of the file in Rublon Downloads.
macOS
1. Click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, type Terminal in the search field, then click Terminal.
2. Use the following command to generate the checksum:
shasum -a 256 /file/path/my_file.exe
Make sure to replace /file/path/my_file.exe with the actual path to the file
3. Compare the generated value to the checksum of the file in Rublon Downloads.
