VMS Help RTL Routines, PPL$, PPL$UNIQUE_NAME  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

    The Produce a Unique Name routine returns an application-unique
    name. A system-unique string specific to the calling application
    is appended to the string specified by the user. The resulting
    name is identical for all participants in the application, but
    different from those for all other applications on that system.

    Format

      PPL$UNIQUE_NAME  name-string ,resultant-string

                       [,resultant-length] [,flags]

1 - Arguments

 name-string

    OpenVMS usage char_string
    type          character string
    access        read only
    mechanism     by descriptor
    The user-supplied string to be appended by the 'TOP' processes'
    PID. When combined, they will provide a name unique to this
    application.

 resultant-string

    OpenVMS usage char_string
    type          character string
    access        write only
    mechanism     by descriptor
    Resulting unique name. The resultant-string argument is the
    address of a descriptor pointing to a character string containing
    this name. Resultant-string consists of the name-string string
    and an appended system-unique string.

 resultant-length

    OpenVMS usage word_unsigned
    type          word (unsigned)
    access        write only
    mechanism     by reference
    Length of the unique name returned as the resultant-string. The
    resultant-length argument is the address of an unsigned word
    containing this length.

 flags

    OpenVMS usage word_unsigned
    type          longword (unsigned)
    access        write only
    mechanism     by reference
    Specifies whether the supplied name should be unique to the
    application, to the calling process, or to this particular call.
    The default is application-unique. The valid values for flags are
    as follows:

    PPL$M_PROC_UNIQUE  Indicates that the caller wishes the returned
                       name to be unique to the calling process.
    PPL$M_CALL_UNIQUE  Indicates that the caller wishes the returned
                       name to be unique to this particular call.