Calculating IPFS Multihash Of Files Without Uploading Them To IPFS

[leerspace]

The discussion linked below is similar and talks about some of the considerations with trying to do this:

How to calculate file/directory hash?

I’m interested in calculating IPFS hashes for various files and directories, somewhat similar to ipfs add -n. I’ve searched around, but wasn’t able to find any solid documentation on how this is calculated exactly. I’ve had a quick look through code and tried figuring it out from experimentation, and have some basic idea (files are broken into 256K chunks, wrapped in some protobuf format, hashed using SHA256 and there are index pieces which join together these small pieces, in a tree-like fashi…