Since this old post still manages to get a fair number of hits I thought I should fix it up to encourage people to not reveal their MySQL passwords in history logs and process lists by entering it on the command line. The new version uses getopts for parsing command line options. If you pass in "-p", it will prompt you for your database password for each mysql command. If you really want the old bad behavior then "-P password" will do the trick. Enjoy:
It is also possible to put your password in your my.cnf file to have it picked up automatically. You can read more about MySQL password for version 5.4 security here.
