uuid
Generate and decode Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID).
TLDR
Generate a UUIDv1 (based on time and system's hardware address, if present)
Generate a UUIDv4 (based on random data)
Generate multiple UUIDv4 identifiers at once
Generate a UUIDv4 and specify the output format
Generate a UUIDv4 and write the output to a file
Generate a UUIDv5 (based on the supplied object name) with a specified namespace prefix
Decode a given UUID
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)
