Managing Users and Privileges - Learning MySQL - page 348

An example of a command to kill a server running from the /usr/local/mysql directory
would be:
$ kill `cat /usr/local/mysql/data/localhost.pid`
If you specified a custom PID file location with the pid-file option, you'll need to
specify the same location here.
To kill the server under Windows, press the Ctrl-Alt-Del keys together to open the Task
Manager, select the mysqld-nt.exe entry under the Processes tab, and click on the End
Process button.
Once the server is stopped, you need to restart it and change the database root user
password. There are two approaches that you can use. First, you can open a text editor
and create a text file containing an SQL command to update the database root user
password:
SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD(' the_mysql_root_password ');
Save this file under the name reset_root_password.sql . Now, you need to start the
MySQL server with the init-file option, telling the server to execute the commands
in this file:
$ mysqld_safe --init-file= path_to_the_init_file &
For example, on a Linux or Mac OS X system, with the file in the ~/tmp directory, you
would write:
$ mysqld_safe --init-file=~/tmp/reset_root_password.sql &
while on a Windows system with the file in the C:\ directory, you would write:
C:\> mysqld-nt --init-file=C:\reset_root_password.sql &
Note that the server should have permission to access and read this file. If the server
can't access the file, it will refuse to start and write a message such as this one in the
server log:
051009 22:12:01 [ERROR] /usr/sbin/mysqld: File '/home/adam/tmp/reset_root_passwrd.sql'
not found (Errcode: 13)
Here, the name of the initialization file has been mistyped. Once you've started the
server successfully, you should shut it down and start it again normally without the
init-file option. You should then carefully delete the text file containing the pass-
word. If you drag and drop the file to the system Trash can or Recycle Bin, empty this
so that the file can't be easily recovered. Even better, you should use a file-wiping tool
such as shred (under Linux and Mac OS X) or Eraser (under Windows) that ensures
that sensitive files—and any temporary or backup files created by your text editor—
are destroyed when they are deleted.
An alternative approach is to start the server using the skip-grant-tables option. This
tells the server not to check user passwords and access levels: