If you've botched an SVN log entry (typo, etc.), you can fix it as follows:

$ echo "Here is the new, correct log message" > newlog.txt
$ svnadmin setlog myrepos newlog.txt -r 388

If you're using os.system to run a command (such as xterm running man) and you get "broken pipe" errors, you can restore standard pipe functionality with the signal module:

import signal
signal.signal(signal.SIGPIPE, signal.SIG_DFL)

# Call os.system after calling signal.signal.

Note: information taken from http://monkeyfingers.org/ (page now unavailable).

If an NFS mount is frozen because the endpoint is unavailable, you can try a "lazy umount" on the mount to let the kernel take care of cleaning it up, rather than letting user-space processes wait on it:

# umount -l /path/to/mount

Additionally, you can use the NFS "soft" option when mounting the share to prevent hard locking of this kind; see nfs(5). Thanks to Kevin Turner for this tip.