Perhaps you can SSH into the system hosting the network share, and have that computer compute the md5? If you're managing a network with multiple network shares, you might get a good speed boost by making each host compute the md5 values for the files it serves.

I like the idea of checking the 1st 64k of the md5 hash. How would i accomplish that from the code i posted above.

Karger78:

Instead of handing a file handle to $ctx, you would instead read 64K of data from the file handle, and give that chunk of data to $ctx. So it should be something like:

sub md5sum{
   my $file = shift;
   my $digest = "";
   eval{
     open(FILE, $file) or die "Can't find file $file\n";
     my $data;
     read FILE, $data, 65536 or die "Can't read from $file\n$!";
     my $ctx = Digest::MD4->new;
     $ctx->add($data);
     $digest = $ctx->hexdigest;
     close(FILE);
   };
   if($@){
     print $@;
     return "";
   }
   return $digest;
}
[download]

Note: The code is untested...

...roboticus