Writing and reading the MySQL database from Bash

MySQL is a widely used database management system used to manage databases for the storage systems for applications that are written in languages, such as PHP, Python, C++, and so on. Accessing and manipulating MySQL databases from shell scripts is also interesting, as we can write scripts to store contents from a text file or Comma Separated Values (CSV) into tables and interact with the MySQL database to read and manipulate data. For example, we can read all the e-mail addresses stored in a guestbook program's database by running a query from the shell script. In this recipe, we will see how to read and write to the MySQL database from Bash. Let's take this example problem:

I have a CSV file containing details of students. I need to insert the contents of the file to a database table. From this data, I need to generate a separate rank list for each department.

Getting ready

In order to handle MySQL databases, you should have mysql-server and...