Question

All I want to do is create a new database off of a dump created by phpmyadmin.
This dump is located in : /var/www/iadmin/wikifresh/db/template.sql and won’t ever change.

I ran this command once, and the database was created fine

mysql test < /var/www/iadmin/wikifresh/db/template.sql

and it created the database. So, I put that script inside of a php exec command:
(note: $wikiname is the name of the new wiki being created)

$dbwikiname = escapeshellarg($wikiname);
exec("mysql $dbwikiname < /var/www/iadmin/wikifresh/db/template.sql");

now, when this script runs, I get:

ERROR 1049 (42000): Unknown database 'test'

even if I try to run it from my command line I have this issue.

what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

For mysql to be invoked with a default database name, the database must exist.

Some distributions of MySQL happen to ship with a database called test, which explains why your command succeeded at first. One presumes you have since dropped that database? You will need to recreate it before attempting to select it:

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS test;

Of course, you could instead place the above command, followed by USE test; atop your template.sql file and then invoke mysql without specifying a default database.