In a nutshell: to avoid your shell character set from messing with imports, use -r to export and SOURCE when importing.

Dumping safely

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Better do:

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Note that when your MySQL server is notset to UTF-8 you need to do mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 (!) to get a correctly encoded dump. In that case you will also need to remove the SET NAMES='latin1' comment at the top of the dump, so the target machine won’t change its UTF-8 charset when sourcing.

If you only want to dump the structure without data, use

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Importing a dump safely

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