I usually use phpMyAdmin to manipulate tables in my databases but sometimes the file I want to import is too big. In that case I use the command line to import the file.
In this line, I replace a database with formatted sql statements that I’ve edited by hand. the -p flag without an argument will prompt for the root password of the MySQL installation.
mysql -u root -p original_database < /Users/username/Desktop/edited_data.sql
Here I want to replace the entire MySQL database with the backup. I do this on my backup machine from time to time using the nightly My backup. This example shows the password after the flag.
mysql -u root -pYourPassword < mysql-backup.sql