Get MD5 hash of big files in Python

You need to read the file in chunks of suitable size:

def md5_for_file(f, block_size=2**20):
    md5 = hashlib.md5()
    while True:
        data = f.read(block_size)
        if not data:
            break
        md5.update(data)
    return md5.digest()

NOTE: Make sure you open your file with the 'rb' to the open - otherwise you will get the wrong result.

So to do the whole lot in one method - use something like:

def generate_file_md5(rootdir, filename, blocksize=2**20):
    m = hashlib.md5()
    with open( os.path.join(rootdir, filename) , "rb" ) as f:
        while True:
            buf = f.read(blocksize)
            if not buf:
                break
            m.update( buf )
    return m.hexdigest()

The update above was based on the comments provided by Frerich Raabe - and I tested this and found it to be correct on my Python 2.7.2 windows installation

I cross-checked the results using the 'jacksum' tool.

jacksum -a md5 <filename>

http://www.jonelo.de/java/jacksum/

Break the file into 8192-byte chunks (or some other multiple of 128 bytes) and feed them to MD5 consecutively using update().

This takes advantage of the fact that MD5 has 128-byte digest blocks (8192 is 128×64). Since you're not reading the entire file into memory, this won't use much more than 8192 bytes of memory.

In Python 3.8+ you can do

import hashlib
with open("your_filename.txt", "rb") as f:
    file_hash = hashlib.md5()
    while chunk := f.read(8192):
        file_hash.update(chunk)
print(file_hash.digest())
print(file_hash.hexdigest())  # to get a printable str instead of bytes

Below I've incorporated suggestion from comments. Thank you all!

Python < 3.7

import hashlib

def checksum(filename, hash_factory=hashlib.md5, chunk_num_blocks=128):
    h = hash_factory()
    with open(filename,'rb') as f: 
        for chunk in iter(lambda: f.read(chunk_num_blocks*h.block_size), b''): 
            h.update(chunk)
    return h.digest()

Python 3.8 and above

import hashlib

def checksum(filename, hash_factory=hashlib.md5, chunk_num_blocks=128):
    h = hash_factory()
    with open(filename,'rb') as f: 
        while chunk := f.read(chunk_num_blocks*h.block_size): 
            h.update(chunk)
    return h.digest()

Original post

If you want a more Pythonic (no while True) way of reading the file check this code:

import hashlib

def checksum_md5(filename):
    md5 = hashlib.md5()
    with open(filename,'rb') as f: 
        for chunk in iter(lambda: f.read(8192), b''): 
            md5.update(chunk)
    return md5.digest()

Note that the iter() function needs an empty byte string for the returned iterator to halt at EOF, since read() returns b'' (not just '').