mrkc.me

Naming things is hard and the temptation to come up with the Right Naming Convention™ can become a mental block for a certain type of person 👀

Currently, I use this function in my ~/.bashrc:

genhostname() {
    echo "${1:-localhost}-$(gentag 4)"
}

gentag() {
    # This is in its own function since it's useful for other stuff too
    head -c 512 /dev/urandom | md5sum | head -c${1:-'6'}
}

Which can be used like this:

$ genhostname media-mgmt
media-mgmt-c95c

$ genhostname web-proxy
web-proxy-88de

# And here's gentag
$ gentag
ac5d92

$ gentag 12
c2ff66ef39cf