MySQL Reference Manual for version 4.0.18.

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4.3.1 Using Options on the Command Line

Program options specified on the command line follow these rules:

MySQL 4.0 introduced some additional flexibility in the way you specify options. These changes were made in MySQL 4.0.2. Some of them relate to the way you specify options that have "enabled" and "disabled" states, and to the use of options that may be present in one version of MySQL but not another. Those capabilities are discussed here. Another change pertains to the way you use options to set program variables. 4.3.4 Using Options to Set Program Variables discusses that topic further.

Some options control behavior that can be turned on or off. For example, the mysql client supports a --column-names option that determines whether or not to display a row of column names at the beginning of query results. By default, this option is enabled. However, you may want to disable it in some instances, such as when sending the output of mysql into another program that expects to see only data and not an initial header line.

To disable column names, you can specify the option using any of these forms:

 
--disable-column-names
--skip-column-names
--column-names=0

The --disable and --skip prefixes and the =0 suffix all have the same effect of turning the option off.

The "enabled" form of the option may be specified as:

 
--column-names
--enable-column-names
--column-names=1

Another change to option processing introduced in MySQL 4.0 is that you can use the --loose prefix for command-line options. If an option is prefixed by --loose, the program will not exit with an error if it does not recognize the option, but instead will issue only a warning:

 
shell> mysql --loose-no-such-option
mysql: WARNING: unknown option '--no-such-option'

The --loose prefix can be useful when you run programs from multiple installations of MySQL on the same machine, at least if all the versions are as recent as 4.0.2. This prefix is particularly useful when you list options in an option file. An option that may not be recognized by all versions of a program can be given using the --loose prefix (or loose in an option file). Versions of the program that do not recognize the option will issue a warning and ignore it. Note that this strategy works only if all versions involved are 4.0.2 or later, because earlier versions know nothing of the --loose convention.


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