What is the real life use of md5sum command ?

Question

As far as i know we can use both for comparing 2 files, want to know the difference between "hexdump" and "md5sum"?

Answer 1

Lets first understand what is MD5 - The MD5 is a message-digest algorithm is a widely used cryptographic hash function producing a 128-bit (16-byte) hash value, typically expressed in text format as a 32 digit hexadecimal number which is commonly used to verify data integrity.

Now md5sum, md5sum is a computer program that calculates or verifies 128-bit MD5 hashes (for a file)

Example

$ md5sum myfile.txt > md5hash  (you can supply more then one file)
$ cat md5hash
595f44fec1e92a71d3e9e77456ba80d1  myfile.txt
$ md5sum -c md5hash
myfile.txt: OK

Say file got changed or corrupted then the last step will not give you OK as newfile md5hash would not be same as stored md5hash.