How to get the MD5 hash of a file in C++?

Here's a straight forward implementation of the md5sum command that computes and displays the MD5 of the file specified on the command-line. It needs to be linked against the OpenSSL library (gcc md5.c -o md5 -lssl) to work. It's pure C, but you should be able to adapt it to your C++ application easily enough.

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#include <openssl/md5.h>

unsigned char result[MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH];

// Print the MD5 sum as hex-digits.
void print_md5_sum(unsigned char* md) {
    int i;
    for(i=0; i <MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH; i++) {
            printf("%02x",md[i]);
    }
}

// Get the size of the file by its file descriptor
unsigned long get_size_by_fd(int fd) {
    struct stat statbuf;
    if(fstat(fd, &statbuf) < 0) exit(-1);
    return statbuf.st_size;
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    int file_descript;
    unsigned long file_size;
    char* file_buffer;

    if(argc != 2) { 
            printf("Must specify the file\n");
            exit(-1);
    }
    printf("using file:\t%s\n", argv[1]);

    file_descript = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
    if(file_descript < 0) exit(-1);

    file_size = get_size_by_fd(file_descript);
    printf("file size:\t%lu\n", file_size);

    file_buffer = mmap(0, file_size, PROT_READ, MAP_SHARED, file_descript, 0);
    MD5((unsigned char*) file_buffer, file_size, result);
    munmap(file_buffer, file_size); 

    print_md5_sum(result);
    printf("  %s\n", argv[1]);

    return 0;
}

You can implement the MD5 algorithm yourself (examples are all over the web), or you can link against the OpenSSL libs and use OpenSSL's digest functions. here's an example to get the MD5 of a byte array:

#include <openssl/md5.h>
QByteArray AESWrapper::md5 ( const QByteArray& data) {
    unsigned char * tmp_hash;
    tmp_hash = MD5((const unsigned char*)data.constData(), data.length(), NULL);
    return QByteArray((const char*)tmp_hash, MD5_DIGEST_LENGTH);
}

I have used Botan to perform this operation and others before. AraK has pointed out Crypto++. I guess both libraries are perfectly valid. Now it is up to you :-).