structure

I typically use a MySQL GUI like Sequel Pro when I do database dumps and imports working from my Mac. GUI apps often give checkboxes that allow you to choose whether to include the structure/content/drop table command for each table in an export.

When using mysqldump on the command line, though, it's not as simple. You can either do a full dump and exclude a few tables entirely (using --ignore-table, or dump the structures of just one set of tables using the -d option. But you can't do both in one go with mysqldump.

However, you can use the power of redirection to do both commands at once to result in one dump file with all your tables, with structure only for the tables you specify: