When comparing Hashdeep vs Samhain, the Slant community recommends Hashdeep for most people. In the question“What are the best file integrity checkers?” Hashdeep is ranked 3rd while Samhain is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Hashdeep is:
Piecewise mode. It breaks files into chunks before hashing.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Piecewise mode
Piecewise mode. It breaks files into chunks before hashing.
Pro Recursive operations
To get hash values of a directory and output results to a file:
hashdeep -r directory_name/ > hash.txt
To check files against saved has values (audit):
hashdeep -r -a -k hash.txt directory_name
Pro Multiple checksum algorithms
Support for MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, Tiger, and Whirlpool hashes.
Pro Cross-platform
A pre-built version for Windows is available. For macOS, Linux and BSD versions, built by 3rd parties are available.
Pro Can give time estimate
-e attribute will show ETA.
Pro Provides ability to cryptographically sign configuration and database
Samhain provides a method to cryptographically sign both the configuration file(s) and the database.
Pro Provides centralized logging via secure channels
A centralized log server (titled yule
) provides centralized log consolidation and a secure transport between the samhain client and the yule
server.
Pro OS agnostic
Supports POSIX file systems, including Windows support through Cygwin.