I find myself needing this often on different servers, you may find it useful too. This script creates a timestamped dump of a mysql database to the current directory. Assumes it runs as a user who can connect to the database. You can set those credentials using the -u and -p command line switches for mysqldump
#!/bin/bash # retrieve a database and gzip it if [ $# -ne 1] then echo "Usage: `basename $0` {database_name}" exit $E_BADARGS fi DB="$1" DATEZ=`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H%M` OUTFILE="$DB.$DATEZ.sql.gz"; echo "mysqldump for $DB to $OUTFILE" sudo mysqldump --opt -e -C -Q $1 | gzip -c > $OUTFILE