Several portable ways to mint a v4 UUID from the shell — useful for request IDs, idempotency keys, temporary filenames.
Bash
# Linux — kernel-provided
cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid
# f47ac10b-58cc-4372-a567-0e02b2c3d479
# Cross-platform — uuidgen (BSD-style on macOS, util-linux on Linux)
uuidgen
uuidgen | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' # macOS uppercases — fix it
# Via python (always available)
python3 -c "import uuid; print(uuid.uuid4())"
# Via openssl (somewhat random — not a true v4 but good enough as a token)
openssl rand -hex 16
# Or build something shorter and URL-safe for non-UUID use
openssl rand -base64 16 | tr -d '=+/' | head -c 16Save your own code snippets
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