Generating IDs in Unix

Sometimes I've found it handy to be able to generate unique IDs directly from the command line. The easiest and most unique tool to use is uuidgen. UUIDs are 122 bits in length; so colossal that the chances of a collision are incredibly low.

The uuidgen tool generates version 4 UUIDs which is just a random sequence of 128 numbers and letters.

$ uuidgen 6445B35A-BBD6-412C-B782-5B732DCF5919

UUIDs are probably what you want, but they're really a PITA to read out to someone, say over the phone. They're also ugly to look at.

Generating Friendlier IDs

For a recent project I was working on I wanted a smaller ID. Luckily openssl can generate and hash random data which we can truncate with printf

$ id=$(openssl rand 1000 | openssl sha1) && printf "%s${id:0:8}\n"
7cb6c62b

That's a bit nicer, but it definitely comes with tradeoffs. The tradeoff being you have a higher chance of collisions. The range [a-z0-9] gives us 36 possibilties (base 36) and 36⁸ gives us 2.82 x 10¹² which looks like a lot but you have to make sure it still fits your use case. IE, not instant messaging but maybe for a build environment.