Generating just a SHA-256 hash from the Linux command line

Question

I'm looking for a single command that emits just the sha256 hash, as a hexadecimal number, of the contents of a single supplied file.

I am aware of shasum -a 256, openssl dgst -sha256, sha256sum et al. but they all emit other information together with the checksum and I would like to avoid the need for post-processing the result with sed or some such.

Answer 1

You may use:

sh -c 'shasum < "$1" | cut -d" " -f1' -- "$file"