How to backup (dump) and restore a specific table in MySQL using the terminal / commandline utilities provided by Linux

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As a web developer, we sometimes may want to export a specific table from a MySQL database. It can be particularly helpful when we are going to apply some changes to a table that is part of a large database and we are interested in backing up that specific table only, rather that whole huge database.

To create a backup (also called dump) of the a table use this command:

mysqldump -u username -p db_name table_name | gzip > db_name.table_name.sql.gz

This will create the backup/dump for the table in the file in compressed format.

We can import back the table to the database as usual we do with normal database dumps:

gunzip -c db_name.table_name.sql.gz | mysql -u username -p db_name

Use the correct values for username, db_name and table_name.