Sometimes you want to write a shell or other script, and that script is going to have to run under sudo. Under such conditions if the script does anything that requires authentication it will not act as expected. In plain terms it means that the regular popup for authentication will not appear. The tool maybe [...]
It happens often that I forget to change the default character set of a database to utf8 and so find out late in the development cycle that many of my fields are based on non utf8 character sets (mostly latin1). Then I go in and modify each field in turn using ALTER TABLE [table] MODIFY [...]