Quickly hash some text with md5, sha1, or sha256. Works with piping input.

pyhash.py

#!/usr/bin/env python2.7
# 
# Install this in your PATH as `pyhash`.
# If you want more cryptographic hashing functions, try the PassLib module.
#
# Don't use this script for anything security related!

import hashlib

algorithms = dict(
  md5 = lambda s: hashlib.md5(s).hexdigest(),
  sha1 = lambda s: hashlib.sha1(s).hexdigest(),
  sha256 = lambda s: hashlib.sha256(s).hexdigest(),
)


def usage():
  print 'Usage:', sys.argv[0], '<algorithm> [text to hash]'
  print 'Available algorithms:'
  for algo in algorithms:
    print '\t', algo


if __name__ == '__main__':

  import sys

  try:
    algo = algorithms[sys.argv[1]]
  except (KeyError, IndexError):
    usage()
    sys.exit(1)

  if len(sys.argv) > 2:
    text = sys.argv[2]
  else:
    text = sys.stdin.read()

  print algo(text)

This gist is deprecated. Most *NIX environments will ship with md5sum and shasum executables that do all of this and more.