From: Morning Star Date: October 3 2012 1:35pm Subject: passing shell variable to the SET data type in parentheses List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/228300 Message-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi guys, i have a problem when trying to pass shell variable to the SET data type in parentheses. i have a variable like this: $ echo $var "value1","value2","value3" what i did: mysql -u $user -p${password} --skip-column-names -e 'ALTER TABLE '$table' MODIFY '$kolom' SET(" '$var' ");' $database ; the result: ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'value1","value2","value3' at line 1 what do i have to do? please help me. Greetings, Marco