What is the alternative?

I don’t know the ‘mysqlhotcopy’ tool. It should prompt for the pwd itself if not given on the command line. It’s a serious bug if it does not! Note, that any user (unless restricted to incredible lengths) can see the process table. So you really have to be the only one logged in.

To avoid the line popping up in your history, using bash, you may set the environment variable $HISTIGNORE to ‘ *:&’, and add a space before ‘mysqlhotcopy’. This setting of $HISTIGNORE does not add lines with leading space to the history. Maybe you can tweak $HISTIGNORE into never memorise lines that start with ‘mysqlhotcopy’, read bash(1).

In fact I just stubled over this page by accident and was attracted by the word Debian. I don’t use any DB software, but that’s another story…

What is the alternative?

I could not find a date on this page, so I really don’t know if it’s still up to date/relevant.

However, I’d like to point out an important security issue: Giving passwords on the command line as in

mysqlhotcopy -u root –password=RootsPassWord wordpress /mnt/backups/wordpress/;

is almost certainly a bad idea. For two reasons:

If the process does not overwite its command line arguments immediately, they can be observed in the table of running processes (using the ps command or the /proc file system). If it does, the argument may still be visible in the timespan between process invocation and argument deletion. Furthermore altering ones command line arguments is a dirty hack.
The password is stored in plain text in your shell history. I.e., you have to take care abut (who has access to) this file even more, than about the system password file which stores only encrypted passwords. Also think about backing up your $HOME.

And I miss a preview button for the comment