On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 03:32:24PM -0500, Cindy-Sue Causey wrote: > This is coming from someone who was naive about this a half hour ago. > I knew UUID and UID were about identification so I searched "what is > pid identification linux".
To clarify: "UID" is User IDentifier. It's a number that your login name maps to (usually 1000 or so on Debian), and is how the system keeps track of user accounts. Human-readable names like "greg" or "cindy" are only for humans. What really matters is the UID number. "UUID" is Universally Unique IDentifier. It's a string of digits and dashes that a computer is supposed to be able to generate in such a way that another computer (or a different process on the same computer) will not create the same one. It's kind of like a random number, except with the intent that nobody else can get the same number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier UUIDs have nothing to do with the identification of people. A UUID is generated when you create a new file system on a disk partition. This UUID is (supposedly) unique to that file system, and allows the system to know which file system is which, so it can mount them all in the correct places. Even if the device changes from /dev/sdb to /dev/sdc or whatever. Other uses exist, but that's the one that people are most likely to encounter.
