mysql startup shell problems

Question

since met so many startup errors,I decide to analyze mysql startup shell.while some code fragment I cannot understand clearly.

version:

mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.43, for osx10.8 (i386) using readline 5.1

368 # 369 # First, try to find BASEDIR and ledir (where mysqld is) 370 #

372 if echo '/usr/local/mysql/share' | grep '^/usr/local/mysql' > /dev/null 373 then 374 relpkgdata=echo '/usr/local/mysql/share' | sed -e 's,^/usr/local/mysql,,' -e 's,^/,,' -e 's,^,./,' 375 else 376 # pkgdatadir is not relative to prefix 377 relpkgdata='/usr/local/mysql/share' 378 fi

what's the purpose of line 372? a little weird

any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

At first glance, this is very strange indeed... but here's a solution to this mystery.

372: if echo '/usr/local/mysql/share' | grep '^/usr/local/mysql' > /dev/null
373: then

grep returns true if it matches and false if it doesn't, so this is testing whether the string /usr/local/mysql/share begins with (^) /usr/local/mysql. Output goes /dev/null because we don't need to see it, we just want to compare it.

"Well," you interject, "that's obvious enough. The question is why?" Stick with me.

If it matches:

374:   relpkgdata=echo '/usr/local/mysql/share' | sed -e 's,^/usr/local/mysql,,' -e 's,^/,,' -e 's,^,./,'

Beginning with /usr/local/mysql/share, strip off the beginning /usr/local/mysql, then strip off the beginning / then prepend ./.

So /usr/local/mysql/share becomes ./share.

Otherwise, use the string /usr/local/mysql/share.

375: else
376:   # pkgdatadir is not relative to prefix
377:   relpkgdata='/usr/local/mysql/share'

---

"That's all fine, too," I hear you say, "but why go through all these gyrations to (apparently) compare and massage two fixed literal strings?? We already know the answer, so what's up with all the tests and substitution?"

It's a fair question.

My first suspicion was that there was some sort of magic bash hackery going on that I didn't recognize, but no, this code is really all too simple to be something along those lines.

My second suspicion, since this is notably absent from MySQL 5.0.96 (which I am not running but keep on hand for reference), was that this was an abandoned attempt to introduce some new magical behavior into mysqld_safe which was never finished and replaced with actual variables, the testing and massaging of which would have made a lot more sense than doing the same thing to literal strings.

But, no. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. What this is, is an example of doing something simple... the hard way. At least that's what it looks like to me. There actually is a somewhat rational explanation. To find it answer, you have to look into the source code (not binary) distribution.

MySQL has a lot of "hard-coded" defaults. This turns out to be an example of these.

In the source file scripts/mysqld_safe.sh, the snippet above looks very different:

if echo '@pkgdatadir@' | grep '^@prefix@' > /dev/null
then
  relpkgdata=`echo '@pkgdatadir@' | sed -e 's,^@prefix@,,' -e 's,^/,,' -e 's,^,./,'`
else
  # pkgdatadir is not relative to prefix
  relpkgdata='@pkgdatadir@'
fi

Ah, source munging. Pattern substitution.

When you're compiling MySQL from source, the file scripts/Makefile contains instruction that use sed to replace things like @prefix@ and @pkgdatadir@ with the literal values. The same thing, of course, happens when Oracle or the Linux disto maintainers compile their binary distribution from source. These paths get hard-coded into many, many, many places in the code, including this script... resulting in the otherwise incomprehensible comparison of two literal strings that somebody should already have known the answer to.

Instead of testing at build time, whether one path is an anchored substring of the other, and the "relpkgdata" value should be expressed relative to the current directory and modifying this script accordingly, that logical test is actually deferred until runtime, comparing two literals that were substituted in for their placeholders at build time.

---

I've gone to this amount of detail, not because it will help you troubleshoot, because I suspect it won't. It was, however, just bizarre enough to warrant some further investigation.

If you are having difficulty getting MySQL Server running... well, you shouldn't be, because it's a well-established system and it should work. If /bin/sh on your system isn't a symlink to /bin/bash, you might want to change mysqld_safe's shebang line from #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash, but beyond that, I suspect you are sniffing down the wrong rabbit hole by looking at mysqld_safe to get to the bottom of your issue. As convoluted as mysqld_safe is, it can't be said that it isn't time-tested. As they say, "the problem is somewhere else."

If I may, I'll suggest that you familiarize yourself with some of our other communities where you're likely to find the answer you need, particularly Ask Ubuntu, Super User, Server Fault, and Database Administrators. Familiarize yourself with each site's community, scope, and the level of existing expertise that each community expects on the part of those who ask questions there, and search the sites for the specific problem you're encountering. It's very likely someone has seen it and we've fixed it on one of them, if not here on SO.