Selecting a whole database over an individual table to output to file

Ok Im having trouble finding out how to select a full database for backup as an *.sql file rather than only an individual table.

On the localhost I have several databases with one named "foo" and it is that which I want to backup and not any of the individual tables inside the database "foo".

The code to connect to the database;

//Database Information
$dbhost = "localhost";
$dbname = "foo";
$dbuser = "bar";
$dbpass = "rulz";

//Connect to database
mysql_connect ($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass)
    or die("Could not connect: ".mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($dbname) or die(mysql_error());

The code to backup the database, one question I have with this is where do I set were the *.gz file is saved?

$backupFile = $dbname . date("Y-m-d-H-i-s") . '.gz';
$command = "mysqldump --opt -开发者_StackOverflowh $dbhost -u $dbuser -p $dbpass $dbname | gzip
            > $backupFile";
system($command);

My brain is hurting near to the end of the day so no doubts i've missed something out very obvious.

Thanks in advance to anyone helping me out.

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You've missed mysqldump! Its a command line utility designed specifically for what you are trying to do.

Writing a backup file manually is rather hard. Writing one that you will consistently be able to recover from is very hard. Check out the docs, it has a lot of options that you can use to specify what exactly you want to save.