This is a quick one that I learned from a co-worker. He was in the MySQL shell and instead of ending his query with a semi-colon, like I normally use, he used \G. The results are interesting, instead of results showing in rows with the fields as columns, results are displayed vertically. Each record is separated by a row number and each field is on a newline with the field name.
SELECT * FROM `actions` LIMIT 3;
+--------------------------+---------+--------------------------+------------+-------------------+ | aid | type | callback | parameters | label | +--------------------------+---------+--------------------------+------------+-------------------+ | comment_publish_action | comment | comment_publish_action | | Publish comment | | comment_save_action | comment | comment_save_action | | Save comment | | comment_unpublish_action | comment | comment_unpublish_action | | Unpublish comment | +--------------------------+---------+--------------------------+------------+-------------------+
SELECT * FROM `actions` LIMIT 3\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
aid: comment_publish_action
type: comment
callback: comment_publish_action
parameters:
label: Publish comment
*************************** 2. row ***************************
aid: comment_save_action
type: comment
callback: comment_save_action
parameters:
label: Save comment
*************************** 3. row ***************************
aid: comment_unpublish_action
type: comment
callback: comment_unpublish_action
parameters:
label: Unpublish comment
Also, you can use \g in place of a semi-colon. Another one I found on the MySQL command list page just now was \e, which opens your text editor and allows you to edit the query. I know I can use this when I mistype part of a query that I was breaking up into multiple lines.