Restoring a backup of a database or table

mysql [options] db_name < filename.sql

Note that:

• db_name needs to be an existing database;
• your authenticated user has sufficient privileges to execute all the commands inside your filename.sql;
• The file extension .sql is fully a matter of style. Any extension would work.
• You cannot specify a table name to load into even though you could specify one to dump from. This must be done within filename.sql.

Alternatively, when in the MySQL Command line tool, you can restore (or run any other script) by using the source command:

source filename.sql

or

\. filename.sql