I have installed mysql in /usr/local/ directory. But when I try to use the server by typing mysql -u root it says '/usr/local/bin/mysql: No such file or directory'. I could understand that it looks in a different directory. But how to change it? Or should I have to install mysql in that directory? In which case, mysql installer does not allow me to change the directory as well.
1 Answers
When you type a command name without a path on a Unix-like shell, the shell looks for something of that name in every directory listed in your $PATH
environment variable, in order.
You can see the contents of that with
echo $PATH
They are colon-separated.
If you want to add another directory to it (such as /usr/local/bin
, which you'd need in this case), have a look at this question or this one. You could also just run that binary directly by running /usr/local/bin/mysql -u root
.
But this is nothing to do with the title of your question. To answer that, see the man page of mysql, which says:
ยท --user=user_name, -u user_name The MySQL user name to use when connecting to the server
In other words, that is setting the user to be root
, for purposes of authenticating with the database server. Note that this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the root
Unix user.

- 9,541
- 4
- 55
- 74