While developing applications or using services or mounting disks in Linux systems we may see the term UUID or 128-bit number which might seem interesting. UUID is a 128-bit number that is used to identify things like name, record, disk whatever we want.
Uniqueness Of UUID
What makes UUID so special or interesting is its uniqueness. Yes it is right event two different and discrete systems creates UUID it is assumed both are unique and do not collide each other or with other UUID’s. Actually they are not perfectly unique but the probability of the collusion is very very very low to count.
Example UUID
Here are some UUID examples.
a8098c1a-f86e-11da-bd1a-00112444be1e
We can see that fstab content of the Linux systems contains UUID in order to identify the disk partition.
$ cat /etc/fstab
Generate UUID with Python
There are different ways to generate UUID. There is a lot of web-based UUID generators but using Python is more attractive. We can use Python uuid module to generate UUID with different options.
Generate UUID Based Host ID
While generating UUID we can make some part of UUID bound to the host. We will import uuid module and run uuid1() function in order to generate host-based UUID.
import uuid
uuid.uuid1()
Generate Fully Random UUID
If we need to generate completely random UUID we need to call uuid4() function. Every time we call this function will create completely different UUIDs.
import uuid
uuid.uuid4()