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(Continued from previous question...)
How to connecting to the MySQL Server
MySQL client programs generally require that you specify connection parameters when you want to access a MySQL server: the
host you want to connect to, your user name, and your password. For example, the mysql client can be started like this
(optional arguments are enclosed between `[' and `]'):
shell> mysql [-h host_name] [-u user_name] [-pyour_pass]
Alternate forms of the -h, -u, and -p options are --host=host_name, --user=user_name, and --password=your_pass. Note that
there is no space between -p or --password= and the password following it.
NOTE: Specifying a password on the command line is not secure! Any user on your system may then find out your password by
typing a command like: ps auxww.
mysql uses default values for connection parameters that are missing from the command line:
The default hostname is localhost.
The default user name is your Unix login name.
No password is supplied if -p is missing.
Thus, for a Unix user joe, the following commands are equivalent:
shell> mysql -h localhost -u joe
shell> mysql -h localhost
shell> mysql -u joe
shell> mysql
Other MySQL clients behave similarly.
On Unix systems, you can specify different default values to be used when you make a connection, so that you need not enter
them on the command line each time you invoke a client program. This can be done in a couple of ways:
You can specify connection parameters in the [client] section of the `.my.cnf' configuration file in your home directory.
The relevant section of the file might look like this:
[client]
host=host_name
user=user_name
password=your_pass
You can specify connection parameters using environment variables. The host can be specified for mysql using MYSQL_HOST. The
MySQL user name can be specified using USER (this is for Windows only). The password can be specified using MYSQL_PWD (but
this is insecure; see the next section).
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