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  1. MariaDB Server
  2. MDEV-40926

Strange things happen when invoking mariadb-secure-installation with --help option

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    • Q1/2027 Server Maintenance

    Description

      The mariadb-secure-install script is basically just a thin wrapper that delegates all the actual work to the mariadb command line client binary.

      The script itself basically only processes --basedir as its only option, plus the "where to find options" options like --defaults-file, everything else it just passes down 1:1 to the mariadb command line client invocations, and then just checks the returned status code for success vs. error.

      Now the problem with --help: when passing this option down to the mariadb client tool it will just print its help output and return without doing anything; that output is swallowed by the calling script though and never exposed to the user if no error code is returned from the call.

      So when calling mariadb-secure-installation --help, naively assuming that this will give help output on the tool itself, the tool actually pretends to run and perform all its actions while actually don't doing anything, so making --help act more like a --dry-run option.

      It would be better to add an actual --help option to the script itself to make it act like the rest of the command line tools: just printing its name and version and a short summary of the command line options actually supported by it.

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            sanja Oleksandr Byelkin
            hholzgra Hartmut Holzgraefe
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