Summary

Configurable unique ID generation.

Overview

Provided is an implementation of a "unique" ID (UID) generator in Python. The implementation does not follow UUID or GUID standards, but rather uses available system, host, user, shell environment, process, and other ephemeral information fed into a hasher (by default MD5) to generate the UID.

The system is designed to be used both as a standalone application and as a module. The data used to be fed into the hash, as well as the hashing mechanism itself, can be overridden both through the command line and programmatically by importing the module.

Getting the software

The current version of uid is 1.0.2.

The latest version of the software is available in a tarball here: http://www.alcyone.com/software/uid/uid-latest.tar.gz.

The official URL for this Web site is http://www.alcyone.com/software/uid/.

Requirements

uid.py is intended to be used under UNIX and UNIX-like systems in Python 2.x.

License

This code is released under the GPL.

Introduction

The module works by implementing a UIDGenerator which uses available information to generate a hash object, and is invoked with its generator method; the generator returns the hash object itself. To create this hash factory, which can either be derived from HashGenerator or simply one of the available modules that follows the hasher pattern, such as the standard md5 or sha modules. By default, the md5 module is used.

Sample usage

To generate and print one UID:

        ./uid.py

To see the input that goes into the hash, you can run it in verbose mode:

        ./uid.py -v

To specify an alternate hashing mechanism (in this case SHA), you can specify another module to use:

        ./uid.py -H sha

To feed in additional (hopefully uniquifying) information, use the -x option:

        ./uid.py -x "This is more incidental information"

Finally, one can generate multiple UIDs in one run with the -n option:

        ./uid.py -n 10

These options, of course, can be intermixed.

Invocation

The following command line options alter the behavior of the program as follows:

The -V/--version option will print the version of the program and exit; -h/--help will print some usage and then exit.

The -v/--verbose option will in effect use an identity hashing function, and will show the environmental information that goes into creating the hash.

A new hasher can be chosen with the -H/--hasher option; this must be a module which implements a standard hasher interface. Examples are md5 (the default), or sha. The module is imported through __import__ so any available custom module can be provided here, provided it behaves the same way that md5 or sha do.

To generate multiple UIDs in one run, use the -n/--number option.

Finally, to provide additional incidental information, use the -x/--extra option.

Wish list

A set of options to choose between the different update groups would be great; this would allow people to use uid to merely generate host IDs, user IDs, etc.

References

• The hasher API is described in comments, as well as in the standard Python library entries for md5 or sha.

Release history

• 1.0.2; 2004 May 19. Change -p to -x.

• 1.0.1; 2003 Jan 25. Swap -v (verbose) and -V (version information) options; fix -p option.

• 1.0; 2002 Aug 14. Initial release.

Author

This module was written by Erik Max Francis. If you use this software, have suggestions for future releases, or bug reports, I'd love to hear about it.

Version

Version 1.0.2 $Date: 2004/05/19 $ $Author: max $