How to best display in Terminal a MySQL SELECT returning too many fields?

Chris Jacob picture Chris Jacob · May 29, 2009 · Viewed 210.8k times · Source

I'm using PuTTY to run:

mysql> SELECT * FROM sometable;

sometable has many fields and this results in many columns trying to be displayed in the terminal. The fields wrap onto the next line so it is very hard to line up column titles with field values.

What solutions are there for viewing such data in terminal?

I don't have nor want access to phpMyAdmin - or any other GUI interfaces. I'm looking for command-line solutions such as this one: Save MySQL Query results into text or CVS file

Answer

Rytmis picture Rytmis · May 29, 2009

Terminate the query with \G in place of ;. For example:

SELECT * FROM sometable\G

This query displays the rows vertically, like this:

*************************** 1. row ***************************
                 Host: localhost
                   Db: mydatabase1
                 User: myuser1
          Select_priv: Y
          Insert_priv: Y
          Update_priv: Y
          ...
*************************** 2. row ***************************
                 Host: localhost
                   Db: mydatabase2
                 User: myuser2
          Select_priv: Y
          Insert_priv: Y
          Update_priv: Y
          ...