md5sum of a file without file name assigning to a variable in python

Question

I'm trying to assign the md5 sum of a file (in ubuntu) to a variable(any) in python script as below

aList=subprocess.check_output(["md5sum",filename])

i want to assign only sum to the variable for that i used below code but it's not working

aList=subprocess.check_output(["md5sum",filename," | awk '{print $1}'"])

please help me to find out solution

thanks in advance

Answer 1

Rather than shelling out to perform the md5sum, use Python's inbuilt hashlib.md5 implementation:

import hashlib

with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
    hexdigest = hashlib.md5(f.read()).hexdigest()
    print(hexdigest)