When automating mysqldump it is necessary to pass authentication information along with the command. While you can pass the credentials on the command line this is considered unsafe as the password would be visible to all users using the ps afx command (for example). A workaround for this is using expect a program that is meant to automate user interaction for terminal programs. IT simulates a tty and passes input to the controlled program depending on its output.

Sometimes it is nessesary to copy a Linux binary with its lib dependencies to a folder or archive. For example when creating an chroot emvironment, create an initramfs or copy a binary from one machine to another with the same architecture and kernel interface (this is hacky, yes) Because I frequently needed to do this, I wrote a small shellscript for that purpose. Here comes the shellscript, explanation will follow ...

Using /dev/random to create randomness in shell scripts