Program options specified on the command line follow these rules:
Options are given after the command name.
An option argument begins with one dash or two dashes,
depending on whether it is a short form or long form of the
option name. Many options have both short and long forms.
For example, -?
and --help
are the short and long forms of the option that instructs a
MySQL program to display its help message.
Option names are case sensitive. -v
and
-V
are both legal and have different
meanings. (They are the corresponding short forms of the
--verbose
and --version
options.)
Some options take a value following the option name. For
example, -h localhost
or
--host=localhost
indicate
the MySQL server host to a client program. The option value
tells the program the name of the host where the MySQL
server is running.
For a long option that takes a value, separate the option
name and the value by an “=
”
sign. For a short option that takes a value, the option
value can immediately follow the option letter, or there can
be a space between: -hlocalhost
and
-h localhost
are equivalent. An exception
to this rule is the option for specifying your MySQL
password. This option can be given in long form as
--password=
or as pass_val
--password
. In the
latter case (with no password value given), the program
prompts you for the password. The password option also may
be given in short form as
-p
or as
pass_val
-p
. However, for the short form, if the
password value is given, it must follow the option letter
with no intervening space. The reason
for this is that if a space follows the option letter, the
program has no way to tell whether a following argument is
supposed to be the password value or some other kind of
argument. Consequently, the following two commands have two
completely different meanings:
shell>mysql -ptest
shell>mysql -p test
The first command instructs mysql to use
a password value of test
, but specifies
no default database. The second instructs
mysql to prompt for the password value
and to use test
as the default database.
Within option names, dash
(“-
”) and underscore
(“_
”) may be used
interchangeably. For example,
--skip-grant-tables
and
--skip_grant_tables
are equivalent. (However, the leading dashes cannot be given
as underscores.)
Another option that may occasionally be useful with
mysql is the
--execute
or -e
option, which can be used to pass SQL statements to the server.
When this option is used, mysql executes the
statements and exits. The statements must be enclosed by
quotation marks. For example, you can use the following command
to obtain a list of user accounts:
shell>mysql -u root -p --execute="SELECT User, Host FROM user" mysql
Enter password:******
+------+-----------+ | User | Host | +------+-----------+ | | gigan | | root | gigan | | | localhost | | jon | localhost | | root | localhost | +------+-----------+ shell>
Note that the long form
(--execute
) is followed by an
equals sign (=
).
If you wish to use quoted values within a statement, you will either need to escape the inner quotes, or use a different type of quotes within the statement from those used to quote the statement itself. The capabilities of your command processor dictate your choices for whether you can use single or double quotation marks and the syntax for escaping quote characters. For example, if your command processor supports quoting with single or double quotes, you can double quotes around the statement, and single quotes for any quoted values within the statement.
In the preceding example, the name of the
mysql
database was passed as a separate
argument. However, the same statement could have been executed
using this command, which specifies no default database:
mysql> mysql -u root -p --execute="SELECT User, Host FROM mysql.user"
Multiple SQL statements may be passed on the command line, separated by semicolons:
shell>mysql -u root -p -e "SELECT VERSION();SELECT NOW()"
Enter password:******
+-----------------+ | VERSION() | +-----------------+ | 5.1.5-alpha-log | +-----------------+ +---------------------+ | NOW() | +---------------------+ | 2006-01-05 21:19:04 | +---------------------+
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