I'm trying to get mysql connections bound for localhost to go via tcp rather than via /tmp/mysql.sock. Any ideas how to get this to happen?

(Reason is I've got rinetd redirecting 127.0.0.1 mysql traffic to a remote server so that I can keep localhost as the connection host in php. 1000's of sites using it so not easy to change to 127.0.0.1 etc)

hmm i reckon you might have to hack libmysqlclient to do that. this is probably what you want to edit, in libmysql.c:
1760 /*
1761 ** Grab a socket and connect it to the server
1762 */
1763
1764 #if defined(HAVE_SYS_UN_H)
1765 if ((!host || !strcmp(host,LOCAL_HOST)) && (unix_socket || mysql_unix_port))
1766 {

Brilliant, thanks. We're not far off getting that working.

Many thanks wKkay,
I am John's sysop, I created a patch based on your post and it works beautifully.
If anyone else wants the patch I have created a .patch file a versio of MySQL 3 and am happy to create it for other versions.
The patch is at a-wing.co.uk in the downloads section (forgive the layout, I'm too busy with cluster servers to tidy it right now).
I don't know why MySQL doesn't make this at least a compile time option. I believe you can set it in the config file for PostgreSQL

glad to help :)

just an extra note to anyone reading this thread, if this doesn't take effect, it might be because you have configured php to use its own libmysql (under ext/mysql/libmysql), as opposed to linking to (the shared) libmysql.