Why is the my.cnf file on the server incomplete or has very few entries?

Question

I have accessed a clients server (plesk) via ssh to view/edit the my.cnf and php.ini files if i view them using vi the file seem to be virtualy empty of entries ? see screenshot.

Not sure whether this is an access issue or the files are the right files any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Answer 1

As Rup already mentioned in his comment, the my.cnf file contains only these few lines. It is completely fine, mysql server is able to start also without any config file - in that case it uses the defaults plus whatever is on the commandline. To see what config files mysqld reads and what defaults it uses, just run:

mysqld --verbose --help

and it will produce report containing for example this:

mysqld  Ver 5.0.51a-24-log for debian-linux-gnu on x86_64 ((Debian))

Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/mysql/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf /usr/etc/my.cnf

The following groups are read: mysql_cluster mysqld server mysqld-5.0

Variables (--variable-name=value)
and boolean options {FALSE|TRUE}  Value (after reading options)
--------------------------------- -----------------------------
help                              TRUE
...
wait_timeout                      3600

To see what values a running MySQL server is using, type
'mysqladmin variables' instead of 'mysqld --verbose --help'.