Mysqldump launched by cron and password security

Question

I wrote a script to backup my MySQL databases using:

mysqldump --opt --all-databases -u user -pmypassword > myDump.sql

A cron launches i

Answer 1

to add to Sahil's answer above, use --defaults-extra-file

--defaults-extra-file is used to tell a program to read a single specific option file in addition to the standard option files.

whereas --defaults-file is read instead of the default my.cnf file.