MySQL Dump Viewer

Do not mess with the mysql db. There is a lot more going on there than just the users table. Your best bet is the "SHOW GRANTS FOR" command. I have a lot of CLI maintenance aliases and functions in my .bashrc (actually my .bash_aliases that I source in my .bashrc). This function:

mygrants()
{
  mysql -B -N $@ -e "SELECT DISTINCT CONCAT(
    'SHOW GRANTS FOR \'', user, '\'@\'', host, '\';'
    ) AS query FROM mysql.user" | \
  mysql $@ | \
  sed 's/\(GRANT .*\)/\1;/;s/^\(Grants for .*\)/## \1 ##/;/##/{x;p;x;}'
}

The first mysql command uses SQL to generate valid SQL which is piped to the second mysql command. The output is then piped through sed to add pretty comments.

The $@ in the command will allow you to call it as: mygrants --host=prod-db1 --user=admin --password=secret

You can use your full unix tool kit on this like so:

mygrants --host=prod-db1 --user=admin --password=secret | grep rails_admin | mysql --host=staging-db1 --user=admin --password=secret

That is THE right way to move users. Your MySQL ACL is modified with pure SQL.

From the googling I've done, it appears that this isn't possible through mysqldump itself. You have to pipe the output to something else, like sed:

$ mysqldump --extended-insert ... database | sed 's$),($),\n($g'

That particular sed command will look for the string "),(" and put a newline after the comma.