How to Check SHA512 Checksum on Mac

SHA512 hashes are often used to determine data integrity, whether for matching a downloaded file to an original on a server, or for command output, or to make sure a file transfer was successful, or not tampered with.

Checking a SHA512 hash is pretty easy on a Mac, thanks to bundled command line tools that are preinstalled on any semi-modern MacOS installation. We’ll cover two different methods to check and verify SHA512 hash on the Mac, using both the shasum command, and openssl command.

How to Check & Verify SHA512 checksum with shasum

MacOS includes the shasum command, which makes checking sha512 checksum hashes super easy.

1. Open the Terminal, from /Applications/Utilities/
2. Type the following command, replacing /path/to/file with the path to the file you want to check the hash for:

shasum -a 512 /path/to/file

3. Hit return, the SHA512 hash will be reported in the terminal output

For example, if you’re checking the sha512 has of a file named “DownloadedFile.zip” in ~/Downloads, the command and output may look like the following:

shasum -a 512 ~/Downloads/DownloadedFile.zip

221c66052f4c55ddbedfe75969d2f7513bb2f92d982ca1522264d398d3a23269ed54fc6fcc61e21af09b2692808373a99f93f306dc9af5f77e8c62336b005ad0 DownloadedFile.zip

The long string of alphanumeric characters is the sha512 hash.

How to Check SHA512 Hash with openssl

You can also use the openssl command to verify and check a SHA512 hash checksum, also available to run via the Terminal on a Mac by using the following command string:

openssl sha512 filename

Using the same file example as above, the command and output would look like the following:

~ openssl sha512 ~/Downloads/DownloadedFile.zip

SHA512(DownloadedFile.zip)= 221c66052f4c55ddbedfe75969d2f7513bb2f92d982ca1522264d398d3a23269ed54fc6fcc61e21af09b2692808373a99f93f306dc9af5f77e8c62336b005ad0

With the long string of text and numbers being the SHA512 hash.

So there you go, now you know two different ways to check and verify SHA512 hashes. While SHA256 is perhaps the most commonly used nowadays, SHA512 is gaining ground, but even the cryptographically weaker SHA1 and md5 also remain in use as methods of verifying file or data integrity for comparisons.

We’re obviously focusing on the Mac here, but you can use the same commands on any other device with a unix or linux base or subsystem, including Linux or even Windows with WSL (Linux Bash shell). Happy hashing.