title: How to deal with enormous line lengths created by mysqldump
body: <p>I'm using mysqldump in a cron job to backup a database with over 2 million rows.</p>
  
  <p>It creates a text file which can be used to restore the datalog from the command line.</p>
  
  <p>I thought it would be useful to edit the dump before a restore as a <em>quick</em> way of changing values and table or column names - at least until I learn more and become confident about doing it with ALTER and UPDATE.</p>
  
  <p>Editing large text files does not bother me, but I was surprised to find that in a <strong>250 megabyte</strong> dump of my database, <strong>there were only about 300 lines</strong>. Each line was something like 800k characters long.</p>
  
  <p>Is there another way of generating dumps with more control over line length?</p>
  
  <p>Or should I post-process the dump with tools like sed or Perl?</p>