Hack MySQL Blog

This is far from deeply technical but little things that should be simple but aren’t annoy me. I found that MySQL Sandbox --prompt_prefix and --prompt_body don’t “just work.” I wanted the prompt to be mysql \v> . So I tried:

make_sandbox_from_source /mysql/src/mysql-4.0.30 single --prompt_body=' \v> '
sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
sh: -c: line 0: `make_sandbox /mysql/src/mysql-4.0.30/4.0.30 --prompt_body= \v> '

Maybe my shell knowledge is more terrible than I realize so I verified that ‘ \v> ‘ does not need special escaping:

echo ' \v> '
\v>

Ok, so clearly it’s the fault of make_sandbox_from_source. I tried and tried to do this on the command line but failed. I decided to try ~/.msandboxrc, specifying:

prompt_prefix=mysql
prompt_body= \v>

That didn’t work either; it created the prompt 'mysql4.0.30>. The leading space for prompt_body is ignored and there’s an errant apostrophe at the start. The final working version is:

prompt_prefix=mysql
prompt_body=\v> '

You can’t see it but there’s a trailing space after “mysql” for the prompt_prefix which is not ignored (unlike leading space for the prompt_body).

There’s very few spots left for attending OpenSQL Camp 2009. I’m going, along with several other Percona employees. It’s fun stuff; you should go. I’m not really the social type so I’ll probably be sitting off to the side somewhere coding.