Can't insert data to mysql database with awk [closed] - mysql

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I'm trying to insert some data fom a .tsv file to a mysql database using awk. When I run this, I just get the mysql rules back at the command line. Any ideas?
Here's the command I am using:
awk '{print "INSERT INTO scores(id, score) VALUES('\''"$1"'\'', "$2");"}' "data.tsv" | mysql -u "user" -p "passw" db
I'm not getting any error messages back, but I check my database and no rows have been inserted.

Answer 1

You can try to remove the space between -p "passw", like this:
| mysql -u "user" -p"passw" db

Answer 2

The other answer already hinted that the -p flag has special, counter-intuitive behavior in the mysql client. If you have a space after it, it makes the mysql client prompt you for a password. The argument following is NOT taken as the password, it's taken as the next argument unrelated to -p.
The following two commands are equivalent:
mysql -u <user> -p <databasename>
mysql -p -u <user> <databasename>
If you want to include the password, you must have no space after the -p:
mysql -u <user> -p<password> <databasename>
To make scripts more clear, I like to use the long option names:
mysql --user=<user> --password=<password> <databasename>
But you shouldn't be using passwords on the command-line anyway, because then anyone who can run ps can see your password. Instead, put user & password into an options file and have the client read it.
mysql --defaults-file my.cnf <databasename>
Your awk code is going to output a long series of SQL injection vulnerabilities. I mean, you're trusting that all the content in your .tsv file is safe to insert, won't contain any characters like apostrophes that will do anything unexpected to the SQL syntax. For example, what happens if $1 is "O'Hare"?
Awk doesn't have any function to do string-escapes to protect you from this, nor any feature to do parameterized queries, which is a better method of running safe SQL statements with dynamic values.
I have used awk for other tasks for many years, but I wouldn't use it for this task. For example, in Ruby:
require 'mysql2'
require 'csv'
client = Mysql2::Client.new(:host => "localhost", :database => "test", :username => "...")
sql = client.prepare("INSERT INTO scores (id, score) VALUES (?, ?)")
CSV.open('data.tsv', col_sep: "\t", liberal_parsing: true) do |csv|
csv.each do |row|
sql.execute(*row)
end
end
Another alternative to load TSV files, with much better performance, is to use mysqlimport --local. But there are some configuration values you need to set to get this to work on a default MySQL instance, and the filename must have the same name as the table (except for the .tsv file extension).
Example: I loaded a .tsv file with four lines of text into a table test.scores:
mysqlimport --local test scores.tsv
test.scores: Records: 4 Deleted: 0 Skipped: 0 Warnings: 0