UUIDGEN

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: May 2009
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NAME

uuidgen - command-line utility to create a new UUID value

SYNOPSIS

uuidgen [-r|-t]

DESCRIPTION

The uuidgen program creates (and prints) a new universally unique identifier (UUID) using the libuuid(3) library. The new UUID can reasonably be considered unique among all UUIDs created on the local system, and among UUIDs created on other systems in the past and in the future.

There are two types of UUID's which uuidgen can generate: time-based UUID's and random-based UUID's. By default uuidgen will generate a random-based UUID if a high-quality random number generator is present. Otherwise, it will chose a time-based UUID. It is possible to force the generation of one of these two UUID types by using the -r or -t options.

OPTIONS

-r: Generate a random-based UUID. This method creates a UUID consisting mostly of random bits. It requires that the operating system have a high quality random number generator, such as /dev/random.
-t: Generate a time-based UUID. This method creates a UUID based on the system clock plus the system's ethernet hardware address, if present.

CONFORMING TO

OSF DCE 1.1

AUTHOR

uuidgen was written by Andreas Dilger for libuuid.

AVAILABILITY

The uuidgen command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.