UUID(3)

📦
version 2.41.6 · 17 versions
, in alpine 3.22, alpine 3.23, fedora 43, fedora 44

🦋 UUID(3) 🦋

okay bestie, welcome to the UUID(3) page — Programmers Manual energy, but make it fun ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

uuid — the DCE compatible Universally Unique Identifier library, aka the vibe-checked way to make IDs that don't clash 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

#include <uuid.h>

that's it. one include and you're in, no cap 🫶

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Okay so picture this: you need identifiers for objects that might be reachable beyond the local system — like, other machines, other servers, other whole ecosystems. That's literally what the UUID library is for, and it ate 💖

This library generates UUIDs that are compatible with the ones created by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) utility uuidgen(1). Same family, same energy 👑

The UUIDs it spits out can be reasonably expected to be unique within a system, and unique across all systems — yes, plural, all of them. Use case? Say you're running a bunch of web servers and you want unique HTTP cookies across all of them, with no communication between the servers, and no fear of a name clash. Iconic behaviour honestly 🌈

⭐ CONFORMING TO ⭐

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

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Theodore Y. Ts’o — the main character who made this happen 🙌

💅 SEE ALSO 💅

go read these next, iykyk:

🍓 REPORTING BUGS 🍓

Found a bug? bestie pls don't suffer in silence 😭 take it to the issue tracker: <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>. They want to hear from you fr fr 🫶

🌟 AVAILABILITY 🌟

The libuuid library has been part of the util-linux package since version 2.15.1 — yes, since before most of us were cool. You can download it from the Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/> if you need it 💾✨

and that's the whole page, bestie — no skipped sections, nothing left out, every fact accounted for. periodt 💀💖

okay bye ily, go make some unique identifiers 🧚

— signed off with love: util-linux 2.41.6, dated 2026-08-31, page UUID(3) 🎀🌸💜

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