LinuxCommandLibrary

uuid

Generate and decode Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID).

TLDR

Generate a UUIDv1 (based on time and system's hardware address, if present)

$ uuid
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Generate a UUIDv4 (based on random data)
$ uuid -v [4]
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Generate multiple UUIDv4 identifiers at once
$ uuid -v [4] -n [number_of_uuids]
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Generate a UUIDv4 and specify the output format
$ uuid -v [4] -F [BIN|STR|SIV]
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Generate a UUIDv4 and write the output to a file
$ uuid -v [4] -o [path/to/file]
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Generate a UUIDv5 (based on the supplied object name) with a specified namespace prefix
$ uuid -v [5] ns:[DNS|URL|OID|X500] [object_name]
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Decode a given UUID
$ uuid -d [uuid]
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SYNOPSIS

#include <uuid.h>

DESCRIPTION

The UUID library is used to generate unique identifiers for objects that may be accessible beyond the local system. This library generates UUIDs compatible with those created by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) utility uuidgen(1).

The UUIDs generated by this library can be reasonably expected to be unique within a system, and unique across all systems. They could be used, for instance, to generate unique HTTP cookies across multiple web servers without communication between the servers, and without fear of a name clash.

CONFORMING TO

This library generates UUIDs compatible with OSF DCE 1.1, and hash based UUIDs V3 and V5 compatible with RFC-4122 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122>.

AUTHORS

Theodore Y. Ts’o

REPORTING BUGS

For bug reports, use the issue tracker at <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

AVAILABILITY

The libuuid library is part of the util-linux package since version 2.15.1. It can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.

SEE ALSO

uuid_clear(3), uuid_compare(3), uuid_copy(3), uuid_generate(3), uuid_is_null(3), uuid_parse(3), uuid_time(3), uuid_unparse(3)

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