When you need make a working copy of your database for example to use with copy of your wordpress site, you need to make few things:
# log into your mysql server
mysql -u root -p
# create new database that will store your original database copy
CREATE DATABASE db_copy;
quit;
Now that we have a db, let us dump the original db to file:
mysqldump -u root -p database_to_copy > db-copy.sql
This will dump database_to_copy database to file named db-copy.sql. Now we need to import this dump to our newly created database db_copy.
mysql -u root -p db_copy < db-copy.sql