Efficient MD5 (or similar) hashes

[Kamus of Kadizhar]

ANother newbie question:

I have large files I'm dealing with.  Some 600MB -1.2 GB in size, over a 
slow network.  Transfer of one of these files can take 40 minutes or an 
hour.

I want to check the integrity of the files after transfer.  I can check 
the obvious - date, file size - quickly, but what if I want an MD5 hash?

 From reading the python docs, md5 reads the entire file as a string. 
That's not practical on a 1 GB file that's network mounted.

The only thing I can think of is to set up an inetd daemon on the server 
that will spit out the md5 hash if given the file path/name.

Any other ideas?

-Kamus

-- 
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