mysql dump - exclude some table data

Question

Is it possible, using mysql dump to export the entire database structure, but exclude certain tables data from export.

Say the database has 200 tables, I wish to export

Answer 1

Another possibility that I use is to avoid the lines inserting data into the wanted table.

The principle is to filter out the INSERT INTO lines using grep -v

mysqldump name_of_db | grep -v 'INSERT INTO \`name_of_table\` VALUES'

or

mysqldump name_of_db | grep -v 'INSERT INTO \`name_of_db\`.\`name_of_table\` VALUES'

That you can easily get into a gziped file and a separated error file

mysqldump name_of_db | grep -v 'INSERT INTO \`name_of_db\`.\`name_of_table\`' | gzip > /path/dumpfile.sql.gz 2> /path/name_of_db.err

and therefore get a nice backup of what you want and know what failed if any :-)