NAME
mkid - generates a case insensitive unique name
SYNOPSIS
mkid [inverse] [ut=hh:mm:ss] [date=dd/mm/yyyy]
DESCRIPTION
mkid prints out an eight letter string of the form `Apr3ruiu' or
`May36adf' used for identifying data or request files. The first three
characters are the capitalized abbreviation of the month. The fourth
character is the last digit of the year (1993 in these examples). The fifth
character is the (Universal Time) day of the month in the sequence 1 - 9, a -
v and the final three characters are lower case letters that form an
alphabetic sequence corresponding to the time since the start of the month
(in five second increments) when mkid was
invoked.
Within a given month, the UNIX wild cards (e.g. * or ? ) will sort the id's
in the order that they were taken. Within a given year, the `sort -M' option
will sort them to starting
date.
The file `$HOME_DIR$/mkid.last' contains the last assigned id which ensures
that simultaneous calls for mkid will generate unique id's (for a given
HOME_DIR). The program will wait (if needed) so that a unique id is
generated.
The telco
program calls the same function when it assigns a DATID.
Note: Although ids are guaranteed to be unique for a given telescope,
they may not be unique for two telescopes running on the same
machine.
OPTIONS
The inverse option prints out the string like May10 from an ids
entered into
stdin.
The ut= option and the date= options are used for debugging and
print out the ids for specific times and dates rather than from the system
clock.
SEE ALSO
accepter.csh,
telco