Imagine a non-technical person has sent you a URL with a long random string in it, printed on paper in a font where I and l look identical (true story). Apart from educating them about the merits of URL-shortening, what do you do?
Bash Brace Expansion to the rescue. Using a simple one-liner you can get this solved in next to no time.
Brace Yourself
Using wget (in this example, you could also use curl) we can enumerate all possible permutations with a single command. Open a bash terminal and enter something like the following (note the {I,l} bits where we are unsure of the character):
wget http://example.com/abc{I,l}d_ef{I,l}-GH{I,l}jklmn{I,l}op0qrts
The response that returns 200 OK and not 404 Not Found is the correct link. Simple.
Header image CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Science Museum Group.