Memcached interface is implemented using a textual protocol.

Sometimes it's very useful to be to fetch data stored on your remote server simply by invoking netcat with some shell kung fu, for example: To download the XML result of your nightly data crunching job you might run something like:

echo "get 95ec6c7693ec53771c8a3fb1061562b8" | nc localhost 11211 > console_overview_06_04_2010.xml

The interesting part here is get SOME_UNIQUE_KEY which is part of the memcached protocol.

What other useful usages can you suggest in regard to the ability to interact with memcached using nothing more then command line tools?

Thank you, Maxim.