Best way to generate random file names in Python

Question

In Python, what is a good, or the best way to generate some random text to prepend to a file(name) that I\'m saving to a server, just to make sure it does not overwrite. Tha

Answer 1

The OP requested to create random filenames not random files. Times and UUIDs can collide. If you are working on a single machine (not a shared filesystem) and your process/thread will not stomp on itselfk, use os.getpid() to get your own PID and use this as an element of a unique filename. Other processes would obviously not get the same PID. If you are multithreaded, get the thread id. If you have other aspects of your code in which a single thread or process could generate multiple different tempfiles, you might need to use another technique. A rolling index can work (if you aren't keeping them so long or using so many files you would worry about rollover). Keeping a global hash/index to "active" files would suffice in that case.

So sorry for the longwinded explanation, but it does depend on your exact usage.