Make a unique filesystem path, without creating the file

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Jon Ribbens
<jon+usenet at unequivocal.co.uk> wrote:
> On 2016-02-22, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 05:48 am, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>> Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet at unequivocal.co.uk>:
>>>> I was under the impression that the point of UUIDs is that you can be
>>>> *so* confident that there won't be a collision that for all practical
>>>> purposes it's indistinguishable from being certain.
>>>
>>> Yes, if you generate a random 128-bit number, it will be unique --
>>
>> If you generate a second random 128 bit number, you have a chance of 1 in
>> 2**128 of a collision. All you can say is that it will be *very probably*
>> unique. (I might even allow "almost certainly" unique.)
>
> If you are not prepared to say that something with a
> 340282366920938463463374607431768211455 /
> 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 chance of being true
> is not "certainly true" then I'm not sure how you would not
> be too scared to ever leave the house. Or not leave the house.
> I mean, you're probably going to be hit by 10^25 meteorites,
> which sounds painful.
>
>> If you generate 2**128 + 1 such numbers, you are *guaranteed* to
>
> ... have expired due to the heat death of the universe.

Maybe... but by the time you get to 2**64 of them, you have a 50%
chance of a collision. (That's either utterly intuitive or completely
counter-intuitive, depending on who you are.)

ChrisA