What is the best way to generate a unique and short file name in Java

Question

I don\'t necessarily want to use UUIDs since they are fairly long.

The file just needs to be unique within its directory.

One thought which comes to mind is

Answer 1

I understand that I am too late to reply on this question. But I think I should put this as it seems something different from other solution.

We can concatenate threadname and current timeStamp as file name. But with this there is one issue like some thread name contains special character like "\" which can create problem in creating file name. So we can remove special charater from thread name and then concatenate thread name and time stamp

fileName = threadName(after removing special charater) + currentTimeStamp

Answer 2

Well, you could use the 3-argument version: File.createTempFile(String prefix, String suffix, File directory) which will let you put it where you'd like. Unless you tell it to, Java won't treat it differently than any other file. The only drawback is that the filename is guaranteed to be at least 8 characters long (minimum of 3 characters for the prefix, plus 5 or more characters generated by the function).

If that's too long for you, I suppose you could always just start with the filename "a", and loop through "b", "c", etc until you find one that doesn't already exist.

Answer 3

Why not use synchronized to process multi thread. here is my solution,It's can generate a short file name , and it's unique.

private static synchronized String generateFileName(){
    String name = make(index);
    index ++;
    return name;
}
private static String make(int index) {
    if(index == 0) return "";
    return String.valueOf(chars[index % chars.length]) + make(index / chars.length);
}
private static int index = 1;
private static char[] chars = {'a','b','c','d','e','f','g',
        'h','i','j','k','l','m','n',
        'o','p','q','r','s','t',
        'u','v','w','x','y','z'};

blew is main function for test , It's work.

public static void main(String[] args) {
    List<String> names = new ArrayList<>();
    List<Thread> threads = new ArrayList<>();
    for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
        Thread thread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
                    String name = generateFileName();
                    names.add(name);
                }
            }
        });
        thread.run();
        threads.add(thread);
    }

    for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
        try {
            threads.get(i).join();
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    System.out.println(names);
    System.out.println(names.size());

}

Answer 4

Why not just use something based on a timestamp..?

Answer 5

If you have access to a database, you can create and use a sequence in the file name.

select mySequence.nextval from dual;

It will be guaranteed to be unique and shouldn't get too large (unless you are pumping out a ton of files).

Answer 6

Look at the File javadoc, the method createNewFile will create the file only if it doesn't exist, and will return a boolean to say if the file was created.

You may also use the exists() method:

int i = 0;
String filename = Integer.toString(i);
File f = new File(filename);
while (f.exists()) {
    i++;
    filename = Integer.toString(i);
    f = new File(filename);
}
f.createNewFile();
System.out.println("File in use: " + f);