Correctly setting your mysql prompt using sudo

If you run multiple MySQL environments on multiple servers it’s a good habit to set your MySQL prompt to double check which server you are on.
however, using the MYSQL_PS1 environment variable I found this does not work under sudo (the normal way people run sudo).

I.e., the following syntax’s work.

$ mysql
$ sudo su - -c mysql
$ sudo su - ; mysql

but the following does not.

$ sudo mysql

The trick is actually to ensure via /etc/sudoers you inherit the MySQL_PS1 environment variable.

echo "export MYSQL_PS1="`hostname` [d]> "" | sudo tee /etc/profile.d/mysql.sh
echo 'Defaults    env_keep += "MYSQL_PS1"' | sudo tee /tmp/mysql
sudo chmod 400 /tmp/mysql
sudo mv /tmp/mysql /etc/sudoers.d
Tagged with: Databases MySQL

Related Posts

Fixing Old Software Bugs Without Thinking

Fixing Old Software Bugs Without Thinking

I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output. On Linux it worked fine — I generally ran my workload there, so it never mattered.

Read more
Curating DuckDB Datasets Leveraging AI

Curating DuckDB Datasets Leveraging AI

In Curated MySQL Data Sets for Realistic Testing I described datasets assembled the manual way — download, schema, load, validate, document — over hours or days per source. This post is the follow-up I promised: what changes when AI assists the same workflow, using DuckDB as the target engine and GeoNames as the first example.

Read more
Why INSERT IGNORE should not be used

Why INSERT IGNORE should not be used

Let’s say you’re building a reference table from source data, e.g. a silver medallion table from a primary source. In this example I am using a file of random locations on the globe extracted from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as my primary source.

Read more