Skulker is pretty mature software these days; not much goes wrong and in the environments I run it on a daily basis it quietly goes about its work; handing 1,000,000 files a month and saving 6Tb of disk space in one organization I work in.
However recently I was made to consider a requirement for auditing that required logs to be integrity checked and since Skulker manages the aspect on compressing logs and removing them once old enough it only seemed sensible to extend Skulker to provide the integrity checking facilities too.
Hence for the last few weeks my spare evening time has been spent adding these features and some of the others that had been collecting in the issues log. The coding, testing and documentation changes are now complete and the updates can be found on the relevant Google code page here.
I'll probably write a separate post to describe a typical use of the new checksumming functionality soon; suffice to say it attempts to remain true to my mantra of keeping all things as simple as possible.
Technically the only really interesting thing about the new checksumming functionality is that the two new features (chksumadd and chksum) both support multi-threading. Given that checksum calculation can requires a full sequential read of the file it made sense to provide this facility. Of course whether this makes a difference depends on your Perl implementation, the size and number of files covered (larger files make better sense for threading) and of course the IO and CPU facilities of the machine on which you are running it.
