It's important to remember that MD5 produces a hash of the content. Just because two items produce the same checksum, doesn't mean their content is identical (if it did, then we would never need the infinite supply of monkeys, as there would only be 2^128 possible texts). It's almost a certainty, but not quite. It'd certainly be highly embarassing to block somebody's 5 page thesis, because it happened to have the same MD5 checksum as an already existing "me too!" post.

So MD5 can be used as a first cut for uniqueness, but still has to be followed up with a more precise check if the checksums do turn out to be the same. Just in case...

In reply to Re: Re: Auto-reaping of duplicates by tommyw
in thread Auto-reaping of duplicates by RhetTbull

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