temporary filename generation for ftp

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi all,

I am looking for a script that generates a filename max 8chars long with a selectable letter first and the rest made of a value computed from ip and time and user so that I can put a file without risking that another machine does tha same thing.

thanks for any ideas,

Michael

[John Palmer]

Hi Michael,

Have you considered using ftp's store unique facility instead? This guarantees that your file won't overwrite any other.

Regards,
John

[Simon Hargrave · Accepted solution]

Michael

If you can stretch to 9 characters, you could do something like this: -

echo "obase=16;$(( date ; uname -a ; id ) | cksum | cut -d" " -f1)" | bc

Basically runs date, uname, id and whatever else you might like to use, through cksum to generate a checksum. Then passes this through bc to convert to hexadecimal, and so restrict to a max 8 chars.

If you need it to be 8 chars including your "prefix", you could perhaps just cut the first or last 7 chars from this number?

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Simon,
your idea is simple and ingenious. I think I will go on from there.

John,
your idea isn't bad either. Can I be sure that sunique is supported on all major platforms?

thanks both,

Michael