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From: "Gilbert van den Dobbelsteen" <gilbert@panter.soci.aau.dk>
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Subject: Re: temp file name conflicts in unattended document generation
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 10:15:37 +0100
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> Gilbert van den Dobbelsteen <gilbert@panter.soci.aau.dk> writes:
>
> > For Hans: $$ returns the curent process Id in unix, which is
> > guaranteed to be unique.
>
> Disclaimer: although somewhat relevant to a discussion of unique
>     identifiers for document-generation runs, this is a bit
>     off topic.
>
> Unique by process, yes, but an interesting development in perl is
> mod-perl, where the compiled perl resides inside the web server
> process until the web server dies.

Right, that's what I'll be using in the future (when our new linux server
arrives). I will be using mod-perl for generating labels from forms input. I
am not sure if context is the path for our company, since what we need is
pretty trivial, and can easily be made using pdflib. On the other hand, I
can easily use plain pdftex, since this generates pdf files at high speed.

>
> That means that different invocations of the same perl code with the
> same process id (viz., the web server's) could be producing different
> documents.  So often I avoid the $$ technique for CGI and use a random
> letter/number plus lockfiles instead.
>
> I like Taco's suggestion of using a directory name that contains the
> identifier for a given run.

Taco's solution is very promising for the web-server approach. one can
easily obtain a unique client id, and run the stuff in different
directories, based on that id.

Gilbert.