Mac OS X 10.6 snow leopard uses the bash shell by default. If you install MySQL from the disk image (dmg) from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/, you can make it easy to access the mysql binary from the command line by adding it to your bash path.

Here’s how:

Open terminal, and type:

echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

This adds the default location of the MySQL binary to your shell environment.

Then, you need to force the system to reload your .bash_profile file. Again, from terminal, enter:

. ~/.bash_profile

You can check your environment variables by typing in terminal:

env

Now, to access MySQL from the command line, you only need enter:

mysql