Editing File verification (section)

{{Short description|Checking the formal correctness or integrity of a file}}
{{Refimprove|date=September 2014}}
'''File verification''' is the process of using an [[algorithm]] for verifying the integrity of a [[computer file]], usually by [[checksum]]. This can be done by [[file comparison|comparing two files]] bit-by-bit, but requires two copies of the same file, and may miss systematic corruptions which might occur to both files. A more popular approach is to generate a [[Cryptographic hash function|hash]] of the copied file and comparing that to the hash of the original file.