Mastering UUID Formats: Seamless Conversion with Command-Line Magic

Converting UUID Formats in Command Line

When dealing with UUIDs, you might encounter formats with or without hyphens, and sometimes you need to convert between these two formats. Command-line tools like tr or sed can be used for this purpose. Here are specific conversion methods and explanations of command parameters.

In the examples below, the uuidgen command is used to generate UUIDs in the 8-4-4-4-12 format, and the dbus-uuidgen command is used to generate UUIDs without hyphens. For more methods to generate UUIDs, refer to the related readings at the end of the article.

Converting from Hyphenated UUID to Non-Hyphenated UUID

Using the tr command:

~$ uuidgen | tr -d '-'
c560545a286a4ceb90454d0e428e22de

The tr command is used for character replacement and deletion. Here, tr -d '-' is used to delete all hyphen characters.

Using the sed command:

~$ uuidgen | sed 's/-//g'
25375aed97b244a0a1c18616c3305d72

sed is a stream editor used for text replacement in input streams (or files). s/-//g replaces all hyphen characters with an empty string.

Converting from Non-Hyphenated UUID to 8–4–4–4–12 Format

Using the sed command:

~$ dbus-uuidgen | sed -E 's/(.{8})(.{4})(.{4})(.{4})(.*)/\1-\2-\3-\4-\5/'…