I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days.

I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that completely reset the trial period.

I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party libraries a developer could use to effortlessly guard against this sort of thing?

(If I ever need it again I will buy it. I just literally needed it a couple of times for something personal and will likely never need it again)