Sign up ×

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?

share|improve this question

2 Answers 2

up vote 5 down vote accepted

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:


...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:

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
tar cfpz $NOW.tgz $NOW
du -sh $NOW $NOW/* > $
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.

share|improve this answer
brilliant answer, thank you –  psynnott Mar 27 '10 at 17:21
For something similar to using --defualts-file for mysql, see –  Steven T. Snyder Dec 28 '11 at 21:41
mysqldump -hlocalhost -uUSERNAME -p'PA$$W0RD' DATABASE | 
                                gzip > /home/USERNAME/backups-mysql/BACKUP.gz

It works?

share|improve this answer
Yes, this worked. –  psynnott Mar 25 '10 at 11:44

Your Answer


