The Ubuntu packages come with this snippet in /etc/mysql/mariadb.cnf:

[client]

# Default is Latin1, if you need UTF-8 set this (also in server section)

# default-character-set = utf8

When actually enabling the default character set option by removing the "#" comment sign mysqlbinlog stops working though, as it reads the [client] section, but does not have a --default-character-set option:

mysqlbinlog mariadb-bin.000001 

mysqlbinlog: unknown variable 'default-character-set=utf8'

Possible fixes:

• explicitly rename the section from [client] to [mysql]

• add the "loose-" prefix, so that the option gets ignored by binaries that do not have it