Question regarding checksuming of a file

[Andrew Robert]

Good evening,

I need to generate checksums of a file, store the value in a variable,
and pass it along for later comparison.

The MD5 module would seem to do the trick but I'm sketchy on implementation.


The nearest I can see would be

import md5

m=md5.new()
contents = open(self.file_name,"rb").read()
check=md5.update(contents)

However this does not appear to be actually returning the checksum.

Does anyone have insight into where I am going wrong?

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks