Specifying Program Options not to put an option in the  [client]  group unless it is recognized by  all  client programs that you use. Programs that do not understand the option quit after displaying an error message if you try to run them. List more general option groups first and more specific groups later. For example, a  [client]  group is more general because it is read by all client programs, whereas a  [mysqldump]  group is read only by mysqldump . Options specified later override options specified earlier, so putting the option groups in the order  [client] ,  [mysqldump]  enables  mysqldump -specific options to override  [client]  options. Here is a typical global option file: Here is a typical user option file: To create option groups to be read only by  mysqld  servers from specific MySQL release series, use groups with names of  [mysqld-5.7] ,  [mysqld-8.0] , and so forth. The following group indicates that the  sql_mode  setting should be used only by MySQL servers with 8.0.x version numbers: It is possible to use  !include  directives in option files to include other option files and  !includedir  to search specific directories for option files. For example, to include the  /home/mydir/myopt.cnf  file, use the following directive: To search the  /home/mydir  directory and read option files found there, use this directive: MySQL makes no guarantee about the order in which option files in the directory are read. Any files to be found and included using the  !includedir  directive on Unix operating systems  must  have file names ending in  .cnf . On Windows, this directive checks for files with the  .ini  or  .cnf  extension. Write the contents of an included option file like any other option file. That is, it should contain groups of options, each preceded by a  [ group ]  line that indicates the program to which the options apply. 349 Note Option File Inclusions [client] port=3306 socket=/tmp/mysql.sock [mysqld] port=3306 socket=/tmp/mysql.sock key_buffer_size=16M max_allowed_packet=128M [mysqldump] quick [client] # The following password is sent to all standard MySQL clients password="my password" [mysql] no-auto-rehash connect_timeout=2 [mysqld-8.0] sql_mode=TRADITIONAL !include /home/mydir/myopt.cnf !includedir /home/mydir