The other day I tried to create a view of one of my tables, and I got some weird message (not able to fork lock file PID on /tmp, or something like that, that appealed to the vestigial *ix programmer lobe in my brain).

Anyway, I believed what I read on the internet and did all kinds of things to fix it, all unsuccessfully. I wound up deleting my entire MySQL installation and reinstalling. I did that several times, in fact, because there’s no MySQL uninstaller, just lore distributed across various people’s blogs. I found this post helpful, but what I eventually used was this one.

But I have a little bit of wisdom of my own to contribute, and it is as follows:

Soon after installing MySQL, I created a file .my.cnf in my $HOME directory. It looks like this:

[client]
# The following password will be sent to all standard MySQL clients
password="abc123"

(where abc123 is the real password, of course.)

Long story short: get rid of that file while you’re installing and testing the initial installation of MySQL.