@VinceInMT . Thanks for that. I've not looked at ChatGPT yet. If the learning curve looks too steep I may carry on with Python as it's a relatively straightforward task. The open-source library support for Python is quite amazing.
Now it's off to youTube for a quick deep dive into ChatGpt, make a decision and, most importantly, back to more BW film photography.
Here’s what I asked it: “Write a program in Python that compares the MD5 of files to the MD5 of another set and files and when different copies the second file over the first.”
It might take some tweaking but here’s what it came up with and I like how it provides a narrative about what it did:
To accomplish this task, we can use the hashlib library in Python to calculate the MD5 hash of files and the shutil library to copy files.
Here's the Python code:
import hashlib
import shutil
import os
# Dictionary of MD5 hashes and file paths
md5_dict = {
"md5_hash_1": "path/to/file1",
"md5_hash_2": "path/to/file2",
# Add more MD5 hashes and file paths as needed
}
# Loop through the dictionary and compare the MD5 hashes
for md5_hash, file_path in md5_dict.items():
with open(file_path, "rb") as f:
file_contents = f.read()
file_md5 = hashlib.md5(file_contents).hexdigest()
if file_md5 != md5_hash:
# Copy the second file over the first file
shutil.copy("path/to/second/file", file_path)
print(f"File {file_path} updated with new MD5 hash {file_md5}")
In this code, we first define a dictionary md5_dict that contains the MD5 hashes and file paths of the files we want to compare. We then loop through this dictionary and calculate the MD5 hash of each file using the hashlib.md5() function. If the calculated MD5 hash does not match the expected hash in the dictionary, we use the shutil.copy() function to copy the second file over the first file.
Note that this code assumes that the second file has the same name and file extension as the first file, and that both files are in the same directory. If this is not the case, you may need to modify the shutil.copy() function accordingly. Also, please make sure to replace the file paths in the code with the actual file paths on your system.