2.3.10. Starting MySQL from the Windows Command Line
The MySQL server can be started manually from the command line.
This can be done on any version of Windows.
To start the mysqld server from the command
line, you should start a console window (or “DOS
window”) and enter this command:
C:\> "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin\mysqld"
The path used in the preceding example may vary depending on the
install location of MySQL on your system.
On non-NT versions of Windows, this starts
mysqld in the background. That is, after the
server starts, you should see another command prompt. If you
start the server this way on Windows NT, 2000, XP, or 2003, the
server runs in the foreground and no command prompt appears
until the server exits. Because of this, you should open another
console window to run client programs while the server is
running.
You can stop the MySQL server by executing this command:
C:\> "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin\mysqladmin" -u root shutdown
Note: If the MySQL
root user account has a password, you need to
invoke mysqladmin with the
-p option and supply the password when
prompted.
This command invokes the MySQL administrative utility
mysqladmin to connect to the server and tell
it to shut down. The command connects as the MySQL
root user, which is the default
administrative account in the MySQL grant system. Note that
users in the MySQL grant system are wholly independent from any
login users under Windows.
If mysqld doesn't start, check the error log
to see whether the server wrote any messages there to indicate
the cause of the problem. The error log is located in the
C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server
5.1\data directory. It is the file with
a suffix of .err. You can also try to start
the server as mysqld --console; in this case,
you may get some useful information on the screen that may help
solve the problem.
The last option is to start mysqld with the
--standalone and --debug
options. In this case, mysqld writes a log
file C:\mysqld.trace that should contain
the reason why mysqld doesn't start. See
Section E.1.2, “Creating Trace Files”.
Use mysqld --verbose --help to display all
the options that mysqld understands.
