Thoughts & Ideas About Web Development

I was getting this cryptic error message earlier. It initially looks like a permissions problem but in fact it was caused by prior use of the SELECT .. INTO OUTFILE which dumped a .csv file into the database directory and was preventing the remove directory command from successfully executing.

That directory is /opt/local/var/db/mysql5/[database_name] on Macports, /var/lib/mysql/[database_name] on Linux (well Debian, at least) and FreeBSD /var/db/mysql/[database_name]