The problem
When using MySQL from the CLI, the -e flag comes in handy to execute MySQL commands directly in bash, like mysql -uroot -p -e "SHOW DATABASES;". Which gives nicely formatted output like:
The problem is that this table drawing takes up space on screen. Isn't there a way to get rid of it ?
The solution
The first idea is to check for the MySQL command separators. For example \G gives us this:
So we got rid of the header, but got row separators instead. Not really a net gain here! Of course we could use a | grep -vF "row **************************", but that's not exactly convenient, and might even cause false positives for some queries. Can we do better ?
Turns out we can ; when emitting output, the mysql client checks whether the output is a TTY and uses that info to emit the decorative wrapping around results. If the output is not a TTY, it just outputs plain, pipable, results. Which gives us a nice solution, with trusty old cat(1):
Now we're getting somewhere: piping the mysql stdout to another command makes it no longer be detected as a TTY, so the decoration is no longer used. Of course, we could also just have used the -s option to get that format, but the point here was more to take note of TTY vs pipe. In both cases, all that remains is the headers (here "Database"). Easy to remove too.
That's it. The +2 option to tail makes it start output at line 2, skipping the header. No long command, no false positives.
Closing note: per the man tail reference, the command should actually be tail -n +2, but all versions of tail I know do not actually need the -n in that case.