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mysqladmin -u root status
When you hit Enter you should see a line or two of basic statistics about your MySQL server, like this:
Uptime: 102261 Threads: 1 Questions: 1 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 15 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 0 Queries per second avg: 0.0
If you’re seeing a different message entirely, it’s probably one of two options. First, you might see an error message telling you that the mysqladmin program was unable to connect to your MySQL server:
mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed error: 'Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (10061)' Check that mysqld is running on localhost and that the port is 3306. You can check this by doing 'telnet localhost 3306'
This message normally means that your MySQL server simply isn’t running. If you have it set up to run automatically when your system boots, double-check that the setup is working. If you normally launch your MySQL server manually, go ahead and do that before trying the command again. Second, if you’re using MAMP on the Mac, you’ll probably see this error message instead:
mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed error: 'Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)'
This error message means that the root user on your MySQL server already has a password set. It turns out that, with your security in mind, MAMP comes with a root password already set on its built-in MySQL server. That password, however, is root—so you’re probably still going to want to change it using the instructions below. One way or the other, you should now be able to run the mysqladmin program. Now you can use it to set the root password for your MySQL server:
mysqladmin -u root -p password "newpassword"
Replace newpassword with whatever password you’d like to use for your MySQL server. Make sure it’s one you can remember, because if you forget your MySQL root password, you might need to erase your entire MySQL installation and start over from scratch! As we’ll see in Chapter 10, it’s usually possible to recover from such a mishap, but it’s definitely a pain in the neck.