Generating Checksums in PowerShell

A tiny snippet of PowerShell I needed recently to generate a hash value for a (zip) file then write out that value to a file suitable for shipping to the customer. Originally this was invoked via an MsBuild Exec command but it works equally well as a standalone chunk.

Get-FileHash -Path MyLovelyFile.zip -Algorithm SHA256 |
Select -ExpandProperty "Hash" |
Out-File MyLovelyFile.SHA256.txt

Get-FileHash returns an object containing the path, the hash algorithm and the actual value. Since I'm only really interested in the value and saving it alongside the original source, I use Select to only write the hash property to the file. This is a little more elegant and, more importantly, doesn't reveal the full path of where the command was run (which may be deep in a development source stack or on a build server).