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

    //Generating Unique File Name
    public String getFileName() {
        String timeStamp = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd_HH:mm:ss").format(new Date());
        return "PNG_" + timeStamp + "_.png";
    }

Answer 2

This also works

String logFileName = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMddHHmm'.txt'").format(new Date());

logFileName = "loggerFile_" + logFileName;

Answer 3

Combining other answers, why not use the ms timestamp with a random value appended; repeat until no conflict, which in practice will be almost never.

For example: File-ccyymmdd-hhmmss-mmm-rrrrrr.txt

Answer 4

How about generate based on time stamp rounded to the nearest millisecond, or whatever accuracy you need... then use a lock to synchronize access to the function.

If you store the last generated file name, you can append sequential letters or further digits to it as needed to make it unique.

Or if you'd rather do it without locks, use a time step plus a thread ID, and make sure that the function takes longer than a millisecond, or waits so that it does.