Dear Mr. Green,

first I'd like to thank you for your very clear explanations, which
helped. 'mysql' is an overdetermined word with all the advantages and
disadvantages of that.

While finally getting into the door, I ran into another problem: "pid-file
quit without updating." This seems to be a fairly common phenomenon, to
judge from offered help on the Web. But the explanations are all over the
map, and the help is of dubious value. I've run into this problem several
times. One piece of advice was to use ps ax|grep mysql and then kill the
processes with the number returned by the query. That worked on one
occasion, but on another occasion it didn't. On that occasion, though, if
I logged in as superuser and started the server it worked.

There doesn't seem to be anything about this problem in the mysql
documentation. I not that it seems to be a fairly common kind of error,
with no clearly diagnosis or therapy from a source that can speak with
much authority.

It may be Mac specific and has to do with Startup items that you're not
supposed to use anymore and launcher daemons that are not easily
understood by poor mortals by me. But OS X is a very popular operating
system and MySQL is a very popular database. So I don't quite understand
why very basic installation and operating procedures are so complicated.


Martin Mueller

Professor emeritus of English and Classics
Northwestern University




On 7/31/15 8:40 AM, "shawn l.green" <shawn.l.green@oracle.com> wrote:

>
>
>On 7/31/2015 8:40 AM, Martin Mueller wrote:
>> Sorry for the off-list reply. It was an oversight.
>>
>> That said, the instructions for resetting a forgotten root password
>>have a
>> section for Windows and a section for Unix. The Unix section begins as
>> follows:
>>
>>
>> 1. Log on to your system as the Unix user that the MySQL server runs as
>> (for example, mysql).
>>
>
>Everything that executes on a Linux/Unix/Mac machine executes in the
>context of some kind of user account (the system login). By default,
>mysqld (the database server daemon) is installed to run under the host
>machine user account 'mysql'. It can be changed if you want to change it
>but that is the default. That is why 'mysql' was listed in the "for
>example" section of that instruction.
>
>
>> But if I do this with the command 'mysql -u mysql I get the answer
>>
>
>No. That is how you log into mysqld to open a MySQL client session. The
>instruction was to login to your operating system as the user that
>mysqld operates as. These are fundamentally different accounts at two
>very different levels.
>
>
>
>> Access denied for user 'mysql'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
>>
>> I can do this as super user or normal, and I can try passwords from
>> earlier installations, but none of them work. So I am stopped dead in my
>> tracks, am I not?
>>
>
>That is because you didn't add this line to the [mysqld] section of your
>configuration file before you started mysqld.
>
>skip-grant-tables
>
>If you had, you would not have needed to use any passwords at all. This
>command (on the system prompt) would be all you need to connect to your
>now completely-unlocked database server (see the third section of
>generic instructions that work on any platform).
>
>mysql
>
>
>> As for the datadir, the command "update db locate mysql" works on the
>>Mac
>> and gives me info about a whole set of files in
>> /usr/local/mysql-5.1.73-osx10.6-x86_64. That's where I thought it was,
>>and
>> I deleted a previous installation because I had moved the data I needed
>>to
>> another machine.
>>
>> I'm not a very experienced programmer and have trouble wrestling with
>>the
>> command line. But I think I did my due diligence and didn't find any
>>open
>> doors.
>>
>
>The door is there, you just just need to be able to see it as a door.
>Just a little more experience working on the command line will help.
>... remainder snipped ...
>
>--
>Shawn Green
>MySQL Senior Principal Technical Support Engineer
>Oracle USA, Inc. - Integrated Cloud Applications & Platform Services
>Office: Blountville, TN
>
>Become certified in MySQL! Visit https://www.mysql.com/certification/
>for details.
>
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