2004-08-05 21:57:32

Functions for generating and comparing Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), based on ideas from e2fsprogs.

A UUID is essentially a 128-bit random number that has a string representation of 28 hexadecimal digits, hyphenated in groups of 8-4-4-12. The value could be greater than the number of atoms in the universe; it's extremely unlikely that the same number would ever be generated twice.

UUIDs are defined by ISO/IEC 11578:1996 (Remote Procedure Call) and The Open Group's DCE 1.1 (Distributed Computing Environment) spec (the ISO version was based on an earlier version of the DCE spec). See http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009629399/apdxa.htm#tagcjh_20 for the current version, and also see the expired IETF Internet-Draft http://www.opengroup.org/dce/info/draft-leach-uuids-guids-01.txt for a version with more informative prose and examples.

Copyright 2004 Fourthought, Inc. (USA). Detailed license and copyright information: http://4suite.org/COPYRIGHT Project home, documentation, distributions: http://4suite.org/

Compares, as with cmp(), two UUID strings case-insensitively

Returns a new UUID as a long int

Formats a long int representing a UUID as a UUID string: 32 hex digits in hyphenated groups of 8-4-4-4-12.