Escaping a password using mysqldump console

Question

I am running a mysqldump via a bash script and have encountered a problem with a password that contains special characters.

mysqldump -hlocalhost -uUSERNAME -pPA$$W0RD DATABASE | gzip > /home/USERNAME/backups-mysql/BACKUP.gz 

How do I escape the password?

Answer 1

Even better, don't put the username or password on the command line where it can be seen by anyone who can do ps -ef.

Create a control file named something like /etc/mysqldump.cnf:

[client] user=root password=YOUR_MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD 

...where client is literal (not the name of your server) and YOUR_MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD is... well... your mysql root password.

Then invoke like this:

mysqldump --defaults-file=/etc/mysqldump.cnf DATABASE | gzip > /home/USERNAME/backups-mysql/BACKUP.gz 

Personally my invocation is more like this:

#!/bin/bash NOW=`perl -e 'print time;'` cd /opt/backup/mysql mkdir $NOW for i in `echo "show databases" | mysql -u root --password="MySqlRootPassword" | grep -v Database`; do mysqldump --defaults-file=/etc/mysqldump.cnf --databases $i --opt > $NOW/$i.dump one tar cfpz $NOW.tgz $NOW du -sh $NOW $NOW/* > $NOW.report rm -rf $NOW 

I've never figured out how to use a similar --defaults-file parameter for mysql, however since this command runs fairly quickly the risk of exposure is much lower... although really that should be fixed.

Answer 2

mysqldump -hlocalhost -uUSERNAME -p'PA$$W0RD' DATABASE | gzip > /home/USERNAME/backups-mysql/BACKUP.gz 

It works?