Quiz: Drop non-global users

Somebody asked on Freenode. I don’t know why they wanted it. How would you drop all MySQL users who do not have “GRANT ALL ON *.* … WITH GRANT OPTION”? That is, drop any users who have ‘N’ in any of the privilege columns in `mysql`.`user`.

My solution shown below. Did you think of a different approach?

I used SQL to build SQL which built more SQL. Get the list of ‘priv’ columns from information_schema.columns. Build a query that looks for ‘N’ in any of those columns (it feels funny to search for a constant in a list of fields instead of a field in a list of constants, but it’s perfectly legal). Use the results to build the DROP USER statement.

mysql -BNe "SELECT CONCAT('SELECT CONCAT(''DROP USER '', QUOTE(user), ''@'', QUOTE(Host), '';'') FROM mysql.user WHERE ''N'' IN (', GROUP_CONCAT(column_name), ')') FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_schema = 'mysql' AND table_name = 'user' AND column_name LIKE '%priv';" | mysql -BN | mysql