Posts tagged Generate Unique file name in bash

Whenever the $RANDOM environment variable is accessed, it gives a random number. This can be used to generate a random file name. In the following example randfile function takes prefix and suffix of the temporary file name and returns a temporary file name after checking for its existence.

#!/bin/bash

function randfile
{
        while [ 1 ];
        do
                TNAME="$1""$RANDOM""$2"
                if [ ! -f $TNAME ]; then
                        echo $TNAME
                        exit 0
                fi
        done
}

NAME=`randfile /tmp/test- .tmp`

echo $NAME