MySQL usually pulls settings from a my.cnf file. However, you can end up with settings in include files, which can be defined in the my.cnf using the following directives:
include /home/mydir/myopt.cnf
includedir /home/mydir
Because of this, and the fact that you might not have access to all locations of .cnf files on a filesystem, you can also grab them using the SHOW VARIABLES option within SQL, obtained by
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uroot -p mypassword -e "SHOW VARIABLES;" > /tmp/SQLSettings.txt
In the above command, -uroot defines we’ll be accessing with the root user, -p defines the password (listed as mypassword) and the -e defines that we want to execute a command and then quit. We then use > to dump the output into the defined file.
