The key executables you will require are sha256sum , md5sum and gpg .

For Ubuntu

These are part of the coreutils and gnupg packages, which are installed by default.

For Windows

If you are using bash on Windows 10 (why on earth not? See this tutorial), these tools are part of the default install.

For macOS

You can install the latest GnuPG using Homebrew:

brew install gnupg

The sha256sum program and other useful utilities are provided by coreutils :

brew install coreutils

For other versions of Linux

Your mileage may vary, but these are standard tools included and enabled by default in most systems. If you don’t have them, check with your package manager and search for the executable names given above.

All versions - check the commands are working!

You can check the commands work as expected by running the following:

gpg --list-keys

If this is the first time you have run gpg , this will create a trust database for the current user.

md5sum --version sha256sum --version

Both these commands should output some version information. Now we have the tools we need, we can move on to finding and downloading the files we need