Learning MySQL

Chapter 11. Using an Options File

Over the course of this book, you’ve seen that you can pass options to many of the programs and scripts that are part of the MySQL distribution. For example, you can pass the user and password options to the MySQL monitor. If you don’t specify a value for an option, the default options are used. For example, most client programs try to use the default values localhost and 3306 for the server host and port options, respectively.

If you need to use an option value that’s not the default, you have to specify it each time you run a program that needs that option; this is tedious and prone to errors. Fortunately, you can save option values to an options file, also sometimes called a configuration file, that most of the key MySQL programs and scripts can read. The programs that read options files include: myisamchk, myisampack, mysql, mysqladmin, mysqlbinlog, mysqlcc, mysqlcheck, mysqld, mysqld_safe, mysqldump, mysqlhotcopy, mysqlimport, mysql.server, and mysqlshow.

We’ll start our tour of options files with an example using the MySQL monitor.