Up until recently, I had URLs of the form /item/number, which is due to the reason that this was the URL-naming-scheme of bblog, an ancient blogging software I used years back. Now serendipity supports URLs with the title (minus problematic charakters), which is much better for search engines, because they often rate words that appear in the url better. Now, changing the URL after years of blogging doesn't seem appropriate (probably hundreds of links, trackbacks, bookmarks), so I needed some migration path. Serendipity doesn't support two url schemes out of the box, so I hacked some bash to do the trick. This will generate (after changing the url) forward rules (add them to .htaccess after the s9y-stuff), which send a »moved permanently«-answer. This has do be done only once, as there won't be links on new articles with the old scheme.
It's a fast hack and it probably doesn't fit in other situations without changes, but it's a nice example how fast you get somewhere with some bash and sed magic:

for i in `seq 1 31`; do

        wget --quiet -O - http://www.hboeck.de/archives/P$i.html|grep serendipity_title | \

        sed -e 's:^.*href="\([^"]*\)">.*$:\1:g' | \

        sed -e 's:^/\w*/\(\w*\)-.*:RewriteRule ^item/\1 \0 [L,R=301]:g'

done