Dumping MySQL tables schema's out to file

• The mysqldump command line program does this for you - although the docs are very unclear about this.
• One thing to note is that ~/output/dir has to be writable by the user that owns mysqld. On Mac OS X:

• sudo chown -R _mysqld:_mysqld ~/output/dir
  mysqldump --user=dbuser --password --tab=~/output/dir dbname
  

• After running the above, you will have one tablename.sql file containing each table's schema create table statement) and tablename.txt file containing the data.
• If you want a dump with schema only, add the --no-data flag:

• mysqldump --user=dbuser --password --no-data --tab=~/output/dir dbname