OS X ships with a shasum commandshasum command.
> which shasum /usr/bin/shasum You can use:
> shasum -a 256 <file> More details:
> shasum --help Usage: shasum [OPTION]... [FILE]... Print or check SHA checksums. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input. -a, --algorithm 1 (default), 224, 256, 384, 512, 512224, 512256 -b, --binary read in binary mode -c, --check read SHA sums from the FILEs and check them -t, --text read in text mode (default) -p, --portable read in portable mode produces same digest on Windows/Unix/Mac -0, --01 read in BITS mode ASCII '0' interpreted as 0-bit, ASCII '1' interpreted as 1-bit, all other characters ignored The following two options are useful only when verifying checksums: -s, --status don't output anything, status code shows success -w, --warn warn about improperly formatted checksum lines -h, --help display this help and exit -v, --version output version information and exit When verifying SHA-512/224 or SHA-512/256 checksums, indicate the algorithm explicitly using the -a option, e.g. shasum -a 512224 -c checksumfile The sums are computed as described in FIPS-180-4. When checking, the input should be a former output of this program. The default mode is to print a line with checksum, a character indicating type (`*' for binary, ` ' for text, `?' for portable, `^' for BITS), and name for each FILE. Report shasum bugs to [email protected] 
