uuidgen command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

uuidgen: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: uuidgen: command not found

Solutions to uuidgen: command not found

How To Fix uuidgen: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu uuidgen is provided by uuid-runtime package.

uuid-runtime is:

The libuuid library generates and parses 128-bit Universally Unique IDs (UUIDs). A UUID is an identifier that is unique within the space of all such identifiers across both space and time. It can be used for multiple purposes, from tagging objects with an extremely short lifetime to reliably identifying very persistent objects across a network.

See RFC 4122 for more information.

This package contains the uuidgen program and the uuidd daemon.

The uuidd daemon is used to generate UUIDs, especially time-based UUIDs, in a secure and guaranteed-unique fashion, even in the face of large numbers of threads trying to grab UUIDs running on different CPUs. It is used by libuuid as well as the uuidgen program.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install uuid-runtime

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install uuid-runtime.

sudo apt -y install uuid-runtime

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install uuid-runtime

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix uuidgen command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.