ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock'

Question

I installed MySQL on Mac OS X Mountain Lion with homebrew install mysql, but when I tried mysql -u root I got the following error:

Answer 1

After working on this for several hours what worked for me was go to /etc/mysql/ and edit the my.cnf file. Add the following

[client]
port = 3306
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock