For me, my high bar that I have yet to beat, was the time I pivoted the running OS (ubuntu) into RAM over SSH so I could unmount and image the boot drive without rebooting and loading a live USB (Which would have required a ticket with my provider to enable IPMI)
When the whole shebang of piping/redirection landed, thinking of all the possibilities!
exiting out of vim
If you have binary that is hardcoded to look for some files/libs in a certain path, you can overwrite that path with
seddirectly lol. You just need to make sure to keep the string length the same.sed -i s|/usr|././|gwill change/usrfor the current working dir for example.Would you believe me if I told you this is how conda works? :P
When I actually get an awk/sed command to work.
I’ve had the 1980’s awk book seemingly “forever”, but use awk so infrequently I always need to look things up.
Once upon a time I was installing Linux on a tiny little laptop, whose brand name I’ve forgotten. It was probably a Lenovo. Anyway, it was extremely difficult to install anything on it, and they went to great lengths to make sure no one would be able to install Linux on it. I spent an entire day messing around with the grub terminal, and began to suspect that it had a built-in cut off for the USB port during boot. I think I saw some log output to that effect, but I couldn’t find any way to disable it. After some thought, I got back in grub, unplugged the USB stick that I was installing Linux from, and plugged it back in. The laptop detected and mounted the external drive and I tried to install again.
Worked perfectly.
That this worked when I did it in 2006:
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Warcraft\ III/Frozen\ Throne.exe -openglYes! It used to be so hit or miss with Wine, but I played WoW in it around the same time and it was crazy that it worked (at least most of the time).
Yet in 2025 w3c is a pain in the ass
Wine still feels like magic in 2025
Recovered a legacy COBOL 911 dispatch system after the hard drive containing the root filesystem died, which wasn’t RAID protected at all and had no complete backups except for a few days prior when I started running daily rsync backups out of paranoia because the idiot dipshit sysadmin who set it all up left the company to work directly for one of our customers.
Thankfully the data volume was RAID protected and didn’t die so the critical data was pretty much all there ready to go again after some rebuilding of shit.
Still, took 15 hours to recover. Was a RHEL 4 system when RHEL 6 was current, and we had no way of obtaining the install media or licensing, so I dug up an archived CentOS 4 iso and installed from that, and got stuff working mostly just by copying various files from backup.
Fucking nightmare come true. Drive crashed at noon and we didn’t go home until about 4am.
Migrated a server to a new drive by copying all the files with rsync and chrooting into it. Nothing too impressive from a linux standpoint, but I had no idea that was possible until I tried it.
I used to do this to migrate user profiles on Macs at my previous employer. I’d ssh in and copy everything across the network and then have the user log in on the other computer like magic. Network copy is a beautiful thing.
scp
I’m never using a flash drive again.
Next step: rsync, because it lets you resume.
deleted by creator
Random one recently:
Turned my gaming box into an impromptu audio mixer by connecting my PS5 audio into the line in and routing it with pipewire to the speaker output so I could game while watching endurance racing on the same speakers.
Later found it was easier to do visually with qpwgraph.
Ubuntu like 10 years ago, drop to terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F5 or something),
vlc video.mp4Aand it started playing it with ASCII graphics. Magicmdadm
When the network printer suddenly started printing the picture my kid had drawn in tux paint without me having configured the printer on their PC.
You might actually be a wizard lmao
The real wizards are the folks who made KDE’s printer integration. Or maybe CUPS.
I’ve you ever looked at CUPS code? Forget wizardry, it’s straight up Eldritch lore in typed form.
I used to be a build engineer at an enterprise Linux company that built custom Linux distributions for various device manufacturers.
I built a whole build automation system that used what would be the equivalent of a Docker container for the build system, and it was distributed across the whole company to make simultaneous build in parallel and a system that would check how many build systems were in use or available with a queueing system.
All written in Bash, Perl and Python.
In the early 2ks, computer were ugly grey box with noisy fan and a hard drive that gave the impression a cockroach colony were trying to escape your case. I wanted to build a silent computer to watch Divx movies from my bed, but as a broke teen, I just had access to disposed hardwares I could find there and there.
I dismantled a power supply, stuck mosfets to big mother fucking dissipator, and I had a silent power supply. I put another huge industrial dissipator on CPU (think it was an AMD k6 500Mhz) and had fanless cooling. Remained the hard drive.
Live CD/USB weren’t common at that time. I’ve discovered a live CD distrib (I think it was Knoppix) that could run entirely from RAM.
I removed hard drive, boot on live distrib, then replace CD by my Divx and voila.
Having a fanless-harddriveless computer was pure science fiction for me and my friends at that time.
computer were ugly grey box with noisy fan and a hard drive that gave the impression a cockroach colony were trying to escape your case.
I miss it so much
