uuid(3)

uuid3

Dce compatible universally unique identifier library

Usage

#include <uuid.h>

Overview

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(1).

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.

Releases

12 releases since Debian 3.1 (Sarge); the text changed 10 times.

  1. 3.1
  2. 4.0
  3. 5.0
  4. 6.0
  5. 7
  6. 8–9
  7. 10
  8. 11
  9. 12
  10. 13
  11. Arch

Conforming to

This library generates UUIDs compatible with OSF DCE 1.1, and hash based UUIDs V3 and V5 compatible with RFC-4122 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122>.

Authors

Theodore Y. Ts’o

Reporting bugs

For bug reports, use the issue tracker <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

Availability

The libuuid library is part of the util-linux package since version 2.15.1. It can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.

From util-linux-libs 2.42.4-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.