Maybe if you(qball) can run cat on the other computer, you can also run md5sum or a perl script that does the summing there as Jenda suggested. If you cannot install a script there, but that site has perl and Digest::MD5, you can do something along the lines of open FILE, "/usr/bin/rexec $host -l $user perl -e 'use Digest::MD5 ... and include the code in the command line you put into the open open.

HTH, --traveler