uuid (3) - Linux Manuals

uuid: DCE compatible Universally Unique Identifier library

NAME

uuid - DCE compatible Universally Unique Identifier library

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.

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.

AUTHOR

Theodore Y. Ts'o

AVAILABILITY

libuuid is part of the util-linux package since version 2.15.1 and is available from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.