The method developed by T. Fujiwara et al. (1985) for efficiently computing the minimum distance of shortened Hamming codes using the weight distribution of their dual codes is extended to treat arbitrary shortened cyclic codes. Using this method implemented on a high-speed special-purpose processor, several classes of cyclic redundancy-check (CRC) codes with 24 and 32 parity bits are investigated. The CRC codes of each class are known to have the same minimum distance