Open Source Web Development with LAMP: Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and PHP

5.5. Loading and Dumping a Database

We can load a database or otherwise execute SQL commands from a file. We simply put the commands or database into a file—let’s call it mystuff.sql— and load it in with this command:

$ mysql people < mystuff.sql
					

We can also dump out a database into a file with this command:

$ mysqldump people > entiredb.sql
					

For fun, try the mysqldump command with the people database (a gentle reminder: the password is LampIsCool):

$ mysqldump -uapache -p people 
Enter password: 

Notice that this outputs all the SQL needed to create the table and insert all the current records. For more information, see man mysqldump.