NAME

uniqid -- Create a unique identifier from the current time.

USAGE

uniqid

DESCRIPTION

This task uses the current time to create an identifier that will be unique over the telescope's lifetime. The identifier has the format YMDHHMMS where:

  Y  denotes the year (1981 = 1)
  M  denotes the month of the year (January = 1)
  D  denotes the day of the month
  HH denotes the hour (00-23)
  MM denotes the minutes 
  S  denotes seconds/2

All characters in the identifier are in lower case. The identifier can be modified with the CL concatenation operator, e.g.,

  to> s1 = "id" // uniqid.value

If two different people call this task at the same time or two different processes are running at the same time, there is no guarantee that the identifier is unique. However, if this task is called several times in a script, the identifier will be unique. The time granularity on the identifier name is two seconds.

PARAMETERS

(value) [string]

The unique identifier produced by this task. This is an output parameter.

EXAMPLES

1. Print a unique identifier.

to> uniqid
to> print(uniqid.value)

BUGS

SEE ALSO

uniqfile, uniqname