Dec 102017
Calculates 32 bit file crc's.
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brik - calculate 32-bit CRC

brik -h
brik -gcGCbafvsqWHT file ...

Brik generates and verifies 32-bit CRC values (checksums).
It is designed to generate CRCs for text files that are the
same on all computer systems that use the ASCII character
set, provided each text file is in the usual text file
format for each system. Brik will also optionally use binary
CRCs calculated using every byte in a file. Such binary
CRCs are portable across systems for binary files that are
moved from system to system without any newline conversion.
Brik can be asked to decide by examining each file whether
to calculate a text mode or binary mode CRC for it.

Changes from version 1.0 are summarized at the end of this

The general usage format is:

brik -gcGCbafvsqWHT [ file ] ...

The brackets mean that file, which is the name of a file, is
optional. The three dots indicate that more than one
filename may be typed (separated by blanks). Exactly one of
the options -c, -C, -g, -G, or -h, is required. The -h
option gives a help screen.

In addition to -h, the Brik options available (as they
appear on the help screen) are:

-g look for Checksum: header, generate CRC for rest of

-c get CRC from header, verify CRC of rest of file

-G generate CRC for entire file (add -b for binary files)

-C verify all file CRCs from output of -G (-f is not

-b use binary mode -- read file byte by byte, not line by

-a automatically decide whether each file is text or

-f read filenames (wildcards ok) from specified files

-v be verbose, report all results (else only errors are

-s be silent, say nothing, just return status code

-q be quiet, don't print header for -G

-W after generating CRC with -g, write it to original

-H after generating CRC with -g, print header to stdout

-T include trailing empty lines, normally ignored (text
mode only)


The primary intended use of Brik is to verify Checksum:
headers in Usenet postings and in C and Pascal source files.
A Checksum: header looks like this:

Checksum: 9485762645b (verify with "brik")

The word Checksum: must occur at the beginning of a line.
It is followed by a colon, an optional blank, a ten-digit
decimal 32-bit CRC, and any arbitrary optional string such
as the comment shown above. The CRC value may be followed
by a one-character suffix identifying the type of the CRC.
These suffixes are described later.

When Brik is invoked with the syntax

brik -c file ...

it will search for the Checksum: header in each specified
file, read the CRC value from that header, calculate the
CRC-32 for all lines in the file (except trailing empty
lines) that occur *after* the header line, and report an
error if the two values do not match.


The command

brik -g file ...

tells Brik to look for the Checksum: header in each
specified file, calculate the CRC of the lines in the file
following the header, and print the CRC and filename without
changing the file in any way. You can also ask Brik to
update the Checksum: header with the following command:

brik -gW file ...

This causes Brik to update the Checksum: header in the file
with the newly-calculated CRC. If there is not enough space
for the CRC in the existing header, Brik reports an error
and does not change the existing header. To initially add a
Checksum: header to a file, insert a line of the following
form into the file with a text editor:

Checksum: XXXXXXXXXX -- this is an optional comment

The word Checksum must be at the beginning of a line. The
ten `X' characters shown can be any ten characters. They
will be later replaced by the calculated CRC value. They do
not need to be `X'. The comment following them is optional
and can be any arbitrary string of characters after the CRC
field, separated from it by blanks. As an example, in a C
source file called main.c, you might have:

Checksum: XXXXXXXXXX (verify or update with brik)

Once a header like this exists in the file, invoke Brik as

brik -gW main.c

This will cause the ten `X' characters to be replaced with
the calculated checksum, giving something like this:

Checksum: 1922837484 (verify or update with brik)

Later you can use the command

brik -c main.c

to verify that the contents of the file following the header
have the same CRC as the stored value.

If Brik is invoked with the -c or -g options and it cannot
find a Checksum: header in a file, it prints a row of
question marks. If it is invoked with the -gW option and it
does not find enough character positions after the Checksum:
string to hold the CRC, it does not fill in the CRC and
prints an error message.

Brik can be asked to generate a complete Checksum: header
but print it to standard output instead of writing it to the
file. Do this by adding the -H option. If both -W and -H
are given, the Checksum: header will be written both to the
file and to standard output.


A "whole-file" CRC calculation is done for the entire
contents of a file, without looking for a Checksum: header.
The command

brik -G file ...

asks Brik to do this calculation for all specified files.
The output from this command is a list of files and their
whole-file CRCs. It is sent to the standard output stream,
which in most cases is your screen. The output should be
saved in a file by redirecting it. For example, the command

brik -G *.h *.c > crc.lst

on an MS-DOS system might yield the following in the output
file crc.lst:

# CRC-32 filename

2566277976 getopt.c
100594287 brik.c
1151475469 vms.c
3929503738 turboc.c
2424271922 addbfcrc.c
1943472856 assert.h
2601923477 brik.h

The output of the -G option is in free format. The output
file may be edited by hand. Empty lines and lines beginning
with '#' will be ignored by Brik when it is later asked to
read this file.

This list of filenames and whole-file CRCs may be verified
by a command like this:

brik -C crc.lst

This makes Brik read the file crc.lst, get the CRCs and
filenames from it, do the CRC calculation again for each
file, and report an error if it does not match the CRC
recorded inside crc.lst.

**IX and MS-DOS users (and others who can pipe the output of
one command into another) could use a command like the
following to see if Brik's -G and -C options are working:

brik -G file ... | brik -C

This invokes "brik -G" on some files, sending the output to
a pipe where it becomes the input of "brik -C". If no
filename is specified, Brik reads from standard input, so
"brik -C" will read from the pipe and concurrently verify
all the CRCs that are being generated by "brik -G".

Whole-file CRCs are normally generated in text mode, in
which a file is treated as lines of text. You can also
generate whole-file CRCs in binary mode. See below.


Brik can work in two different modes. The most common mode,
used unless you specify otherwise, is text mode.

In this mode Brik reads all files line by line, and forces
each line of text to be terminated by a newline character of
constant value before doing a CRC calculation. Thus, no
matter what newline character is used by your system, the
CRC calculation will be unaffected. This means that whether
your operating system uses linefeeds to terminate lines
(e.g. **IX), or a carriage return and a linefeed (e.g. MS-
DOS) or a carriage return only (e.g. Macintosh) or nothing
but a record length field (e.g. VAX/VMS), the CRC
calculation in text mode gives the same results.

If a file is not intended to be a text file, the text mode
CRC calculated by Brik may not be reliable and may be
different on different systems. If Brik is calculating a
text mode CRC on a file that appears to contain binary data,
it still calculates the text-mode CRC but adds a "*"
character after the CRC to indicate to warn the user.

Brik can be asked to operate in binary mode by adding a -b
option. Binary mode is applicable only to the -G command,
which acts on whole files. Thus

brik -G file ...

finds whole-file CRCs of all specified files in text mode,

brik -Gb file ...

does the same in binary mode. In binary mode Brik simply
reads and calculates the CRC for all bytes in a file. If a
file is moved from one system to another without any newline
conversion or any other changes, Brik should calculate the
same binary mode CRC for it on both systems.

The output from "brik -Gb" includes a trailing b suffix in
each CRC, so "brik -C" will correctly use binary mode for
such CRCs and it is never necessary to type "brik -Cb"

In its auto-check mode, Brik will itself examine each file
and determine whether it is a text or binary file and
calculate a CRC accordingly. To do this, use the -a option.
Although Brik can determine the type of each file with a
high degree of reliability, it is still possible for it to
come to a wrong conclusion about some files.

The output from "brik -Ga" will include a trailing b
character in the CRC for those files that appeared to be
binary to Brik. You may find both text and binary CRCs in
the output.


The normal behavior of Brik in text mode is to ignore any
trailing empty lines in a file. An empty line is a line
that contains nothing, not even blanks or tabs. (Just
hitting a carriage return when you are editing a text file
usually produces an empty line.) If manipulating a text
file causes trailing empty lines to be added or deleted, the
CRC calculated by Brik will be unaffected. You can override
this if necessary with the -T option, which makes Brik
include trailing empty lines in the CRC calculation. For

brik -gWT

will update the Checksum: header with a CRC that includes
all lines in a text file. Similarly

brik -GT

will find whole-file CRCs that include all lines in a text

When Brik is given the -T option, it adds a T suffix to each
generated CRC. Then, when the CRC is verified with -c or
-C, Brik will correctly include trailing empty lines when
needed without having to be explicitly told to do so.

In binary mode Brik always reads all bytes in a file, so it
does not ignore trailing empty lines, and the -T switch is
not needed.

The effects of the -T and -b options are mutually exclusive.
If both are given, whichever is used later overrides the
first. So -bT is equivalent to -T and -Tb is equivalent to


Under MS-DOS and VAX/VMS, wildcards are allowed on the
command line and will be expanded by Brik. Under **IX,
wildcards are expected to be expanded by the shell and are
not expanded by Brik. If no filename is given, Brik reads
its standard input. By default this is keyboard input, but
it is expected that input will usually be redirected to come
from a file or a pipe. Also, if a filename is explicitly
specified as a dash ("-"), it stands for standard input.

The following five commands (valid under the **IX operating

brik -c myfile # "myfile"
brik -c < myfile # stdin = "myfile"
cat myfile | brik -c # stdin = a pipe
brik -c - < myfile # "-" = stdin = "myfile"
cat myfile | brik -c - # "-" = stdin = a pipe

all have the effect of verifying the Checksum: header in the
file myfile.

Standard input can also be read when using the -C option.
For example, suppose we have already given the command

brik -G *.c *.h > crc.lst

to create a file called "crc.lst" that contains a list of
whole-file CRCs. We can now verify the integrity of these
files with any of the following commands:

brik -C crc.lst # "crc.lst"
brik -C < crc.lst # stdin = "crc.lst"
brik -C - < crc.lst # "-" = stdin = "crc.lst"
cat crc.lst | brik -C # stdin = a pipe
cat crc.lst | brik -C - # "-" = stdin = a pipe


The -f option allows you to have filenames in a list rather
than on the command line. For example, suppose you want to
generate whole-file CRCs of files whose names are selected
by some other program. You could use find (under **IX) or
Stuff (under MS-DOS) to generate a list of filenames. When
the -f option is given, Brik reads filenames, one per line,
from the file(s) specified. Thus you could do the

find . -mtime +3 -print > flist
brik -Gf flist > crc.lst

The first command asks find to generate a list of names of
all files that were modified more than 3 days ago, and sends
the output to the file flist. The contents of flist might
now look like this, as an example:


The second command above asks Brik to read the file called
flist, get a list of filenames from it, one per line, and
generate the whole-file CRC of each of these files. We
additionally redirect the output of "brik -Gf" to the file
called crc.lst. Given the above contents of flist, the
following two commands are exactly equivalent:

brik -Gf flist >crc.lst
brik -G ./sez.doc ./brik.doc ./stuff.doc ./looz.doc >crc.lst

The advantage of the -f option is that once you have
filenames in a file, you need not type them again at the
command line. The -f option also allows you to feed Brik
through a pipe filenames generated by another program.
Consider this command:

find . -mtime +3 -print | brik -Gf - > crc.lst

Under **IX this concurrently invokes both find and Brik. As
find generates a filename and sends it to its standard
output (a pipe), Brik reads the filename from its standard
input and generates its whole-file CRC. The following

find . -mtime +3 -print | brik -Gf - | brik -C -

invokes find to generate filenames, Brik to print the
whole-file CRCs of those files, and Brik again to
immediately verify them.

Under MS-DOS and VAX/VMS (and any other operating system
under which Brik has been installed to expand wildcards
itself), a file specified by the -f option can itself
contain wildcards in the filenames. For example, suppose
the file "wildfile" contains the following lines:


Now if we invoke Brik with the command

brik -Gf wildfile

it will read filespecs from "wildfile," expand wildcards in
each filespec, and generate whole-file CRCs for all matching

If you are checking whole-file CRCs with the -C option, you
do not normally need to use the -f option. When used with
-C, the -f option introduces an additional level of file
naming indirection. For example, the command

brik -C crc.lst

takes a list of CRCs and filenames from "crc.lst" and
verifies them. However, the command

brik -Cf master.lst

does not do the same thing. Instead, it takes a list of
files from "master.lst," looks inside each of those files
for a list of CRCs and filenames, and verifies them.

As an example of the use of -Cf, consider this sequence:

brik -Gb /bin/*.exe > exelist
brik -Gb /bin/*.com > comlist
brik -GT /doc/*.doc > doclist
brik -G /doc/*.man > manlist

Now we have four files called "exelist," "comlist,"
"doclist," and "manlist" containing whole-file CRCs of
various types. We can test the integrity of files listed in
these in four separate commands like this:

brik -C exelist
brik -C comlist
brik -C doclist
brik -C manlist

But we could also do this in a single step by first creating
a file called "biglist" that contains the names of these
four files:


and then use -Cf thus:

brik -Cf biglist

This causes Brik to read filenames from "biglist," look
inside each of those files ("exelist," "comlist," "doclist,"
and "manlist") and check the CRCs found there. A **IX
example to do the same thing in a more compact way might be:

cat exelist comlist doclist manlist | brik -Cf -

The above examples are somewhat contrived, however. We
could also use the following command:

brik -C exelist comlist doclist manlist


Brik accepts options -s, -q, and -v that control the degree
of verbosity.

Normally Brik prints a message only if it detects an error.
For example, if you give the command

brik -c *.c *.h

and Brik finds that all Checksum: headers contain CRCs that
match the calculated value, it prints nothing.

The -v switch makes Brik print a message for each file
tested that contains the word "ok" if stored and calculated
CRCs matched and "BAD" if they did not.

In all messages reporting file CRCs, Brik prints the actual
CRC it calculated, or a row of question marks if it could
not calculate one. Brik fails to calculate a CRC if it is
trying to calculate a header-based CRC (commands -c and -g)
but does not find a Checksum: header in a file.

The -s switch tells Brik to be silent. This will cause
nothing to be printed if Brik does not find a Checksum
header or if CRCs don't match. However, the status code on
exit is still set. The -s option is useful for invoking
Brik from within a shell script (**IX) or a batch file (MS-
DOS) and later testing the error code it returned when it

The -s switch does not suppress the error message printed if
Brik is given a filename and the file cannot be found. For
example, if the command

brik -cs myfile

is given but "myfile" does not exist, Brik will print an
error message even though the -s option was given.

The -q switch makes Brik slightly quieter. Its only effect
is to suppress the introductory comments that are otherwise
generated by the -C option.


o Under VAX/VMS, file manipulation is unpredictable and
the VAX/VMS C runtime library in particular is very
unreliable. One result is that under VAX/VMS, the -gW
option will work only for stream-LF files, which are
the only type of file that VAX/VMS seems to handle
correctly. Fortunately, the -c option will correctly
work for VAX/VMS standard text files.

o The VAX/VMS implementation of Brik simply ignores
filenames that correspond to nonexistent files instead
of giving an error message. VMS users are invited to
fix this bug (probably somewhere in the nextfile()
function in the file vms.c) and send me the fix.

o To avoid annoying error messages, Brik under VAX/VMS
always exits with a status code of 1.

o Due to a problem in the VAX/VMS command interpreter, if
any uppercase option characters are typed (e.g. -C, -G,
-T), Brik will not recognize them as uppercase unless
they are enclosed in double quotes. An example of a
correct command under VAX/VMS:

brik "-GT" *.*

An example of a command that won't work:

brik -GT *.*


This section discusses some ways of using Brik.

- Brik is currently used to create and verify checksums
of articles posted on the Usenet newsgroup While reading Usenet news with
rn, for example, you can verify the Checksum: header of
such an article with the command:

| brik -cv

This feeds the current article to Brik as standard
input and asks it to verbosely verify the checksum.

- C and Pascal source files that are being distributed
can be given their own Checksum: headers. The
advantage of this over listing CRCs separately is that
each file contains its checksum no matter where it
goes. The recipient can easily verify that each source
file was received intact. This is especially valuable
when source files are being sent by electronic mail
through an IBM mainframe-based network, such as BITNET,
that can cause corruption of text files.

Create the Checksum header with a text editor and
initialize its value with the command:

brik -gW file ...

The recipient can verify the checksum with the command:

brik -cv file ...

- To keep track of any unexpected filesystem corruption
or unauthorized changes to system files, Brik can be
used to create a list of checksums. This should be
done using the -b option (all binary checksums) or the
-a option (use text or binary as appropriate). Under
**IX this can be done with a command like this one:

find /bin /usr/bin /lib /usr/lib /usr/new \
-type f -print | \
grep -v '^/usr/bin/beta' | \
grep -v '^/usr/new/lib/news' | \
brik -Gbf - > crc.list

This example uses find to print the pathnames of
certain files, grep to filter out certain directory
subtrees, and then Brik to print checksums of all
selected files. Periodically a background job can be
run to compare the file list against current files and
report any discrepancies:

brik -C crc.lst | mail -s 'brik output' postmaster

Under MS-DOS, create a list of checksums with the help
of Stuff, a find-like file finder program that is
distributed with zoo 2.01:

stuff /bin /msdos /turboc | brik -Gaf - > crc.list

This is a simple mechanism that can be used to detect
unexpected file changes caused by hardware problems or
malicious programs such as viruses and worms. Be
warned, however, that since Brik uses a published CRC
algorithm, very clever deviant programs are possible
that could change a file without affecting its CRC.

To avoid too many false alarms, only files that do not
change much (such as system binaries) should be

Changes from version 1.0 are as follows.

- The CRC calculation has been recoded in 8086 assembly
code suitable for Turbo C/MS-DOS. As a result Brik 2.0
under MS-DOS is much faster than version 1.0.

- The new -a flag makes Brik automatically determine for
each file whether it is text or binary and calculate
the CRC accordingly

- When Brik is asked to calculate a text mode CRC but the
file appears to be binary, it now does not print a
warning message but instead adds a "*" suffix to the
calculated CRC to indicate that the CRC may not be

- The new -H flag makes Brik print the formatted
Checksum: header to standard output.

- Detection of binary files is now more reliable under
MS-DOS. If a control Z character occurs near the
beginning of a binary file, Brik will not be fooled by
the apparent end-of-file but will in most cases
reliably detect that the file is binary.

- The new -q flag suppresses the introductory comments
from the output of the -G command.

Brik is designed to work with computer systems that use the
7-bit ASCII character set and 8-bit bytes with the eighth
(parity) bit set to zero.

Brik has not been tested with computer systems that use
ASCII characters with the eighth bit set or those that use
EBCDIC characters. Although it will calculate a CRC on such
machines, the probability of this CRC being the same as the
one calculated on machines that use 7-bit ASCII is
approximately 0.00000000023.

Error messages are intended to be self-explanatory.

The exit status returned is 1 if Brik was invoked with
incorrect arguments, else it is the number of files found
with missing or invalid CRCs, but not greater than an
operating-system-dependent maximum value.

Both this documentation and Brik are Copyright 1989 Rahul
Dhesi, all rights reserved. Permission is granted to copy,
use, and distribute for any commercial or noncommercial
purpose in accordance with the requirements of version 1.0
of the GNU General Public license.

Note: This software has not been endorsed by the Free
Software Foundation, the creator of the GNU license, and I
am not affiliated with that organization.

Rahul Dhesi
UUCP: {iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
Internet: [email protected]

BRIK(1) USER MANUAL (1989/07/11)

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