Re: Don't you think there are too many *sum utilities?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > Current stable version of coreutils (6.9) has 8(!) utilities
   > which somehow compute or/and check a message digest. They are:
   > 'md5sum', 'sha1sum', 'sha224sum', 'sha256sum', 'sha384sum',
   > 'sha512sum' and finally 'sum' and 'cksum'. It's already a little
   > bit confusing and it seems that it isn't the endpoint yet. There
   > is at least one more under discussion right now - 'md4sum'.

   The sum, cksum and md5sum utilities are frequently used in scripts
   and so those (at least) should IMO remain accessible under those
   names.  Perhaps we could install a unified binary whose behaviour
   depends on the value of argv[0].

That tends to be discouraged, from (standards)User Interfaces:

| Please don't make the behavior of a utility depend on the name used
| to invoke it.  It is useful sometimes to make a link to a utility
| with a different name, and that should not change what it does.

I don't see any major problem why something like `hashsum ALGORITHM'
wouldn't work though, `md5sum' could be the same as `hashsum md5'.
And then md5sum could be a shell script, or just a simple program that
calls `hashsum md5'.