awk inside another awk's system

Question

I am given a file containing the md5 values for files within the same folder. The information is in the file md5checksums.txt in the following format:

b0da7ead9d82a3494d7e0a7099871ef4  ./GCF_000959505.1_ASM95950v1_assembly_report.txt
7ff32cbb16daf46c87b3546ad576ff66  ./GCF_000959505.1_ASM95950v1_assembly_stats.txt
034081da3aa0708f06c2ec1129e4aca9  ./GCF_000959505.1_ASM95950v1_cds_from_genomic.fna.gz

I want to do md5 checks for all the files. I got this command:

awk '{system("md5 "$2)}' md5checksums.txt

But this just gets the md5 values

MD5 (./GCF_000959505.1_ASM95950v1_assembly_report.txt) = b0da7ead9d82a3494d7e0a7099871ef4
MD5 (./GCF_000959505.1_ASM95950v1_assembly_stats.txt) = 7ff32cbb16daf46c87b3546ad576ff66
MD5 (./GCF_000959505.1_ASM95950v1_cds_from_genomic.fna.gz) = 3a30966523a36368ab432f666001f80a

I would like to extract the calculated md5 against the first column of md5checksums.txt I thought I could do something like an awk inside an awk, but I can't get it to work:

awk '{system("md5 "$2" | awk HERE EVALUATE RESULTS AND CHECK IF EQUAL TO $1")}' md5checksums.txt

Answer 1

I'm a bit confused as to why you involve awk in this.

To verify the MD5 checksums in a file produced by GNU md5sum, you do

md5sum -c file.txt

Or, on an OpenBSD or NetBSD system whose md5 utility supports -c filename (not FreeBSD or macOS):

md5 -c file.txt

In your case, file.txt would be your md5checksums.txt file.