Re: temp file name conflicts in unattended document generation

[ecashin@coe.uga.edu (Ed L. Cashin)]

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.

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. 

-- 
--Ed Cashin                     PGP public key:
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