I used to work in the support department of a software company. That was almost four years ago. I got pretty good at that job even though I didn’t enjoy it all that much. As I moved out of tech support and into a System Administrator position, I was surprised how quickly I buried all that support knowledge.

My current employer uses that very same software that I used to support, so I am once again haunted with supporting it. I really don’t mind that much since I don’t have to mess with it that often. Today, however, I was messing around with the jukebox that holds the optical media, trying to determine the best way to handle the large volume of optical media that the software manages.

I decided it would be a good idea to get a detailed list of all the media ever cataloged in the jukebox, when, out of nowhere, the exact command line that I needed popped clearly into my head:

cdadm survey -n +rioh

This command outputs a nice multi-columned list of all media ever cataloged by the jukebox, including different format names of the media as well as media ID number pulled from the software database.

What the command does is irrelevant; what I find interesting is that nearly 4 years later, my mind can still remember obscure commands with the exact syntax necessary to get the desired output. Entorhinal Cortices RULE!