Well the best would be to create the MD5 hash on the remote computer. Are you able to install some scripts there?

I do not know what do you intend to use this for but it reminds me of something I do. To make sure I update all pages and other objects and/or are able to quickly find the differences between two servers I run a service (daemon for the Unixers among us) that occassionaly (and when started) generates MD5 hashes of all files I am interested in and stores them in a DBM file using file paths as keys. If I want to sync two servers I just fetch the tiny DBM files and compare the MD5 hashes.

You might want to do something similar, except maybe you will want to start MD5 indexing "manualy" via the rexec.

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
   -- Rick Osborne

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature