This is an extremely simple and fast C utility written for UNIX, its purpose is to quickly find an available file name for use in shell scripts and so on.
It's a faster replacement for alternative hack in shell script, which is aimed to be more flexible in the future.
Basic usage is to provide a filename as an argument with optional
string(s) $counter that will be replaced with an actual counter.
If counter variable is not provided, filename has .$counter appended.
Examples:
# No files "x" exist:
$ ./freename x
x
$ touch x
$ ./freename x
x.0
$ touch x.0
$ ./freename x
x.1
$ touch `./freename x`
$ touch `./freename x`
$ ./freename x
x.3