Yes, checking the file size (and also last modification time) certainly adds quite a bit of reliability (and is fast), and that alone may actually be sufficient for the purposes of crazy-duck, but when I mentioned checksum, I used the word as a general term for describing the overall techniques of digital "footprints", digests or signatures. I am using on some of my platforms "checksum" utilities actually implementing a CRC-32 algorithm, where the chances of undetected change are 1 in billions (at least in theory).

In reply to Re^3: How to check if a file is modified or missing on windows server using a perl script by Laurent_R
in thread How to check if a file is modified or missing on windows server using a perl script by crazy-duck

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