TIL my TIL is not secure
There is a security issue with the following description - at least when you handle sensitive data.
Thanks to Anthony Sottile for reporting!
Please see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/205180/how-to-pass-password-to-mysql-command-line for a better way to create a login one-liner.
How do you use the output of one bash command as an argument of another command?
For the virtual machines at my web hosting company,
the mysql root password is stored in a config file.
Whenever I need to login as root, I do the following steps:
cat /etc/local/mysql/mysql.passwd
# copy the output
mysql -u root - p # hit enter
# paste the output
I do not paste the password directly after the -p so it does not get stored in the bash history.
All in all, pretty inconvenient.
There must be a better way
We all know pipes ( ls | grep search_term ), but here we need the output as an argument.
While we could assign the output to a variable, there is an easier way.
mysql -u root -p"$(cat /etc/local/mysql/mysql.passwd)"
The above command reads the password from the configuration file,
and directly uses it as input for the mysql command.
The correct term for this is command substitution.