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cshatag is a tool to detect silent data corruption. It is meant to run periodically and stores the SHA256 of each file as an extended attribute. The project started as a minimal and fast reimplementation of shatag, written in Python by Maxime Augier.

See the Man Page further down this page for details.

Similar Tools

Checksums stored in extended attributes for each file

• https://github.com/maugier/shatag (the original shatag tool, written in Python)

Checksums stored in single central database

• https://github.com/ambv/bitrot
• https://sourceforge.net/p/yabitrot/code/ci/master/tree/

Checksums stored in one database per directory

• https://github.com/laktak/chkbit-py

Download

Static amd64 binary that should work on all Linux distros: https://github.com/rfjakob/cshatag/releases

Distro Packages

Compile Yourself

Needs git, Go and make.

$ git clone https://github.com/rfjakob/cshatag.git
$ cd cshatag
$ make

Man Page

CSHATAG(1)                       User Manuals                       CSHATAG(1)

NAME
       cshatag - compiled shatag

SYNOPSIS
       cshatag [OPTIONS] FILE [FILE...]

DESCRIPTION
       cshatag is a minimal and fast re-implementation of shatag
       (  https://github.com/maugier/shatag  ,  written  in  Python  by Maxime
       Augier )
       in a compiled language (since v2.0: Go, earlier versions: C).

       cshatag is a tool to detect silent data corruption. It writes the mtime
       and the sha256 checksum of a file into the file's extended  attributes.
       The  filesystem needs to be mounted with user_xattr enabled for this to
       work.  When run again, it compares stored mtime  and  checksum.  If  it
       finds  that  the  mtime  is  unchanged but the checksum has changed, it
       warns on stderr.  In any case, the status of the  file  is  printed  to
       stdout and the stored checksum is updated.

       File statuses that appear on stdout are:
            <new>         file is missing both attributes
            <outdated>    both mtime and checksum have changed
            <ok>          both checksum and mtime stayed the same
            <timechange>  only mtime has changed, checksum stayed the same
            <corrupt>     mtime stayed the same but checksum changed

       cshatag  aims to be format-compatible with shatag and uses the same ex‐
       tended attributes (see the COMPATIBILITY section).

       cshatag was written in C in 2012 and has been rewritten in Go in 2019.

OPTIONS
       -dry-run    don't make any changes
       -recursive  recursively process the contents of directories
       -remove     remove cshatag's xattrs from FILE
       -q          quiet mode - don't report <ok> files
       -qq         quiet2 mode - only report <corrupt> files and errors
       -fix        fix the stored sha256 on corrupt files

EXAMPLES
       Check all regular files in the file tree below the current working  di‐
       rectory:
       # cshatag -qq -recursive .
       Errors like corrupt files will be printed to stderr.  Run without "-qq"
       to see progress output.

       To remove the extended attributes from all files:
       # cshatag -recursive -remove .

RETURN VALUE
       0 Success
       1 Wrong number of arguments
       2 One or more files could not be opened
       3 One or more files is not a regular file
       4 Extended attributes could not be written to one or more files
       5 At least one file was found to be corrupt
       6 More than one type of error occurred

COMPATIBILITY
       cshatag  writes  the  user.shatag.ts field with full integer nanosecond
       precision, while python uses a double for the whole mtime and loses the
       last few digits.

AUTHOR
       Jakob Unterwurzacher <jakobunt@gmail.com>
       https://github.com/rfjakob/cshatag

COPYRIGHT
       Copyright 2012 Jakob Unterwurzacher. MIT License.

SEE ALSO
       shatag(1), sha256sum(1), getfattr(1), setfattr(1)

Linux                              MAY 2012                         CSHATAG(1)

Changelog

Short changelog - for all the details look at the git log.

v2.2.1, 2024-08-23

• Fix Makefile to ensure the correct version string is baked into the binary (#29)

v2.2.0, 2024-08-23

• Do not update corrupt files unless -fix is passed (#28, behavoir change)
• Linux: use 100ns resolution when comparing timestamps instead of 1ns to match SMB protocol restrictions (#21 commit)
• MacOS: use 1s resolution when comparing timestamps to match MacOS SMB client restrictions (#21)

v2.1.0, 2022-10-22

• Add -dry-run #22
• This version is called v2.1.0 as opposed to v2.1 to conform to go.mod versioning rules (three-digit semver).

v2.0, 2020-11-15

• Rewrite cshatag in Go
• add MacOS support
• Add -remove flag
• Add -q and -qq flags
• Accept multiple files per invocation to improve performance
• Work around problems on MacOS SMB mounts (#11)

v1.1, 2019-06-09

• Add test suite (make test) (commit)
• Add Travis CI
• Drop useless trailing null byte from user.shatag.sha256

v1.0, 2019-01-02

• Add make format target

2019-02-01

• Fix missing null termination in ts buffer that could lead to false positives (commit)

2017-05-04

• Respect PREFIX for make install (commit)

2016-09-17

• Check for malloc returning NULL (commit)

2012-12-05

• C source code & man page published on Github (commit)