Your "bright spark" isn't very bright at all. FTP access to a server doesn't imply the ability to obtain an MD5 sum of files on said server. Moreover, in the general case, it is not a requirement that the files have the same bytes on the local and remote side. Transferring in ASCII mode will convert line endings to the local notion; if the two systems have a different idea of what constitutes an end of line ("\r\n" vs "\n" vs "\r"), ftp will convert them on-the-fly. So, the two files needn't even hash to the same value. However, you said that you're transferring from one PC to another, so that might help. The only way I could see pulling this off is to have pre-computed md5 files lying around for each file that you'd want to transfer. You'd grab the file you want, it's corresponding hash file, hash the file when you're done transferring it, and compare the computed value with the hash file that you got from the server.