Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!yale!ox.com!mudos!mju
From: mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Changing .zoo archive to .lzh archive: help!
Keywords: Unique directory names
Message-ID: <1991Feb17.160724.10421@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Date: 17 Feb 91 16:07:24 GMT
References: <885@caslon.cs.arizona.edu>
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Programmer's Pit Stop, Public Access Unix +1 313 665 2832
Lines: 34

In article <885@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> dave@cs.arizona.edu (Dave P. Schaumann) writes:
>Where "no-dot" is a simple program that echos back everything in argv[] that
>isn't "." or ".."

Why bother?  Why not just use ".??*", and save the overhead of writing
and executing another program?

>getpid() and some unlikely template, like "xx-######-temp".  What I need to

Again, why bother?  The shell already provides access to your PID in the
form of the "$" variable.  So, you can just do this:

temp=$$xx.temp
# ...
mkdir $temp
# ...

>  1.  Is it a reasonable assumption that no two concurrent getpid()'s will
>      return the same value?

Yes; a process ID is just that -- a unique identifier assigned to an
individual process.  Since a great many things would break if two
concurrently executing processes could have the same PID, Unix kernel
writers go to great lengths to make sure updates to the process table
are atomic.

>  2.  Is there a better way to do this?

See above.

-- 
Marc Unangst                | "I think I have a bad disk.  Even though I
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us   |  folded it to fit into my drive, it still
...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju  |  doesn't work..." -Caller to a tech support line