Question

I’m trying to determine which my.cnf mysql is using. Is there a command or something for mysql or mysqladmin that shows which one is being loaded?

Answer 1

On my linux servers in the startup script (/etc/init.d/mysql) it defines

CONF=/etc/mysql/my.cnf

that it uses to start MySQL daemon

EDIT:

also running

mysqld --verbose --help

shows the following info:

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf /usr/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

So if run as a daemon through init script it will look into /etc/mysql/my.cnf and if started from the command line it will look there only on the second attempt.