Question

Is there a way to restrict certain tables from the mysqldump command?

For example, I’d use the following syntax to dump only table1 and table2:

mysqldump -u username -p database table1 table2 > database.sql 

But is there a similar way to dump all the tables except table1 and table2? I haven’t found anything in the mysqldump documentation, so is brute-force (specifying all the table names) the only way to go?

Answer 1

You can use the –ignore-table option. So you could do

mysqldump -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASE --ignore-table=DATABASE.table1 > database.sql 

There is no whitespace after -p (this is not a typo).

To ignore multiple tables, use this option multiple times, this is documented to work since at least version 5.0.

If you want an alternative way to ignore multiple tables you can use a script like this:

#!/bin/bash PASSWORD=XXXXXX HOST=XXXXXX USER=XXXXXX DATABASE=databasename DB_FILE=dump.sql EXCLUDED_TABLES=( table1 table2 table3 table4 tableN    )   IGNORED_TABLES_STRING='' for TABLE in "${EXCLUDED_TABLES[@]}" do :    IGNORED_TABLES_STRING+=" --ignore-table=${DATABASE}.${TABLE}" done  echo "Dump structure" mysqldump --host=${HOST} --user=${USER} --password=${PASSWORD} --single-transaction --no-data --routines ${DATABASE} > ${DB_FILE}  echo "Dump content" mysqldump --host=${HOST} --user=${USER} --password=${PASSWORD} ${DATABASE} --no-create-info --skip-triggers ${IGNORED_TABLES_STRING} >> ${DB_FILE}