global counter in application: bad practice?

Posted by Martin on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Martin
Published on 2010-05-12T18:47:31Z Indexed on 2010/05/12 18:54 UTC
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In my C++ application I sometimes create different output files for troubleshooting purposes. Each file is created at a different step of our pipelined operation and it's hard to know file came before which other one (file timestamps all show the same date).

I'm thinking of adding a global counter in my application, and a function (with multithreading protection) which increments and returns that global counter. Then I can use that counter as part of the filenames I create.

Is this considered bad practice? Many different modules need to create files and they're not necessarily connected to each other.

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