UUID - Shell/Bash

Introduction

UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is a 128-bit identifier used to identify unique objects or entities. shell/bash provides a command uuid to generate UUID values. In this tutorial, we will learn how to use the uuid command to generate UUID values in shell/bash.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial you should have:

• Basic knowledge of shell/bash commands
• A Linux distribution installed

Creating UUID values

To create UUID values in shell/bash, we use the command uuidgen.

uuidgen

This command generates a UUID value and prints it on the console. For example,

BAC12BA6-60F6-4850-89B8-E2E957AA10F7

You can also specify the number of UUID values using the -n option. For example,

uuidgen -n 5

This command generates 5 UUID values and prints them on the console. For example,

7CE164B9-31B7-4226-B192-6BD37D6DCF51
D7CD2B60-FA9D-4A1E-BAB7-2FE536EA034A
244E146C-61D1-456A-B170-9A3F3FDF5D5A
C5B26C31-E2B4-4B10-84F1-DA003265C8B1
727B2BCE-53D2-46E8-98BE-89FD01238B96

Using UUID values in scripts

We can use UUID values in shell/bash scripts to generate unique names for files, directories, or any other objects. For example,

filename="somefile_$(uuidgen).txt"

This command generates a UUID value and appends it to the string somefile_ to create a unique filename. For example,

somefile_AE8161C2-6A75-4520-9D9A-FE03A6517B42.txt

Similarly, we can generate directory names or any other object names using UUID values.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to use the uuidgen command to generate UUID values in shell/bash. We also learned how to use UUID values in shell/bash scripts to generate unique names for files, directories, or any other objects.