Skip certain tables with mysqldump

Question

Is there a way to restrict certain tables from the mysqldump command?

For example, I'd use the following syntax to dump only table1 and table2:

mysqldump -u username -p database table1 table2 > database.sql

But is there a similar way to dump all the tables except table1 and table2? I haven't found anything in the mysqldump documentation, so is brute-force (specifying all the table names) the only way to go?

Answer 1

You can use the --ignore-table option. So you could do

mysqldump -u username -p database --ignore-table=database.table1 --ignore-table=database.table2 > database.sql