MySQL is a widely used database management system. In 2009, Oracle acquired SUN and with that the MySQL database. The MariaDB package is a fork of the MySQL package that is independent of Oracle. MariaDB can access MySQL databases, but MySQL engines cannot always access MariaDB databases.
Both MySQL and MariaDB have interfaces for many languages, including PHP, Python, C++, Tcl, and more. All of them use the mysql command to provide an interactive session in order to access a database. This is the easiest way for a shell script to interact with a MySQL database. These examples should work with either MySQL or MariaDB.
A bash script can convert a text or Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file into MySQL tables and rows. 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.
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