Mysqldump only tables with certain prefix / Mysqldump wildcards?

Question

I have this huge, messy database I am cleaning up. It houses 500+ tables, which is the result of combining Magento Enterprise with Joomla in one single DB.

To make things worse, there is a set of 70+ Joomla tables that are not in use at all. These are all prefixed with bak_.

Just deleting these bak_ tables will be easy, but I want to 'bak' them up first (see what I did there?). In my mind I can picture a command like this:

mysqldump -u username -p mydatabase bak_* 

But this doesn't work. What would be the best way to do this? Thanks!

EDIT: Yes, I could explicitly list the 70 tables to include, or the ~430 tables to exclude, but I am looking for a better way to do this, if possible.

Answer 1

You can specify table names on the command line one after the other, but without wildcards. mysqldump databasename table1 table2 table3

You can also use --ignore-table if that would be shorter.

Another idea is to get the tables into a file with something like

mysql -N information_schema -e "select table_name from tables where table_schema = 'databasename' and table_name like 'bak_%'" > tables.txt  

Edit the file and get all the databases onto one line. Then do

mysqldump dbname `cat tables.txt` > dump_file.sql 

To drop tables in one line (not recommended) you can do the following

mysql -NB  information_schema -e "select table_name from tables where table_name like 'bak_%'" | xargs -I"{}" mysql dbname -e "DROP TABLE {}"