I wonder why there was a contribution to employ gmd5sum on FreeBSD, at a time when md5sum was our default ?
It implied that md5sum was not a good default for FreeBSD at the time ?
(Note: this contribution was made by @DimitryAndric in #475. Feel free to weight in)

Also, looking around on this topic, I see this sentence :

Use md5 on FreeBSD. The standard command for calculating MD5 checksums on FreeBSD systems is md5, not md5sum or gmd5sum.

And now I'm even more confused.

I think #475 was because we didn't have a GNU compatible md5sum command in base at the time, but only a slightly incompatible md5 command (it produces md5 hashes obviously, but its output is different than GNU md5sum's).

Now all supported FreeBSD versions (I think from 13.x onwards) do have a md5sum command that behaves similarly to the GNU version.

For reference.
The md5sum command was introduced with the md5 -r switch on FreeBSD in 13.1 (2022-05-16) or 14.0 (2023-11-20).

• https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/#userland-programs
• https://www.freebsd.org/releases/14.0R/relnotes/#mfc-highlights
• freebsd/freebsd-src@086feed

In addition, currently supported FreeBSD versions are 14.0, 13.3 and 13.2 (end of life is 2024-06-30).

Finally, a small difference between md5sum and md5 -r is quoted from the manual.