Installing MySQL - Learning MySQL - page 81

The Contents of the MySQL Directory
A MySQL installation has several key files and directories, and several optional ones.
In this section, we'll briefly cover the contents of the MySQL directory when you've
downloaded and installed MySQL using a MySQL AB package.
First, there are some text files covering the licensing conditions and the installation
process. It's a good idea to have a quick read through these:
• COPYING
• README
• EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT
• INSTALL-BINARY
The directory also contains the configure script to configure and start a freshly installed
server; you shouldn't need to use this if you've followed the instructions in this chapter.
Then there are several subdirectories; the important ones are:
bin/
Contains the executable programs— binaries —such as mysqld_safe and mysqlad
min . Compiled programs contain binary (0 and 1) code, rather than human-read-
able text, hence the name of this directory. However, you'll probably find some
human-readable script files in this directory too.
data/
Contains a subdirectory holding the data and index files for each database on the
server. A newly installed and configured MySQL server comes with the mysql and
test databases, so you'll have at least these two subdirectories in your data direc-
tory. The mysql database contains information on user access privileges to different
databases; as its name suggests, the test database can be used for testing.
docs/
Contains the MySQL manual. Under Linux and Mac OS X, the manual file is in
an info file called mysql.info ; you can view this by changing into the docs directory
and typing:
$ info mysql.info
To see how to navigate in the info viewer, press the “?” key in the program.
Under Windows, the manual file is in the Microsoft HTML Help file called man
ual.chm ; you can view this file by double-clicking on the file icon, or by changing
to the Docs directory and typing:
C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0> hh manual.chm
In practice, you're more likely to find it more convenient to refer to the HTML
version of the MySQL manual available from the MySQL AB web site.