uuid

OSSP's Universally Unique Identifier generator

OSSP uuid is a ISO C99 application programming interface (API) and corresponding command line interface (CLI) for the generation of DCE 1.1, ISO/IEC 11578:1996 and RFC 4122 compliant Universally Unique Identifier (UUID). It supports DCE 1.1 variant UUIDs of version 1 (time and node based), version 3 (name based, MD5), version 4 (random number based) and version 5 (name based, SHA-1). Additional API bindings are provided for the languages ISO-C++98, Perl 5 and PHP 4/5. Optional backward compatibility exists for the ISO C DCE-1.1 and Perl Data::UUID APIs. UUIDs are 128-bit numbers which are intended to have a high likelihood of uniqueness over space and time and are computationally difficult to guess. They are globally unique identifiers which can be locally generated without contacting a global registration authority. UUIDs are intended as unique identifiers for both mass tagging objects with an extremely short lifetime and to reliably identifying very persistent objects across a network.