It's a pain if you ever forget your MySQL root password. Fortunately it's a fairly straightforward process to reset it, here's how:
pkill -9 mysqld;
echo "UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('MyNewPass') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;" > /tmp/reset-pass.sql
mysqld_safe --init-file=/tmp/reset-pass.sql &
sleep 10
pkill -9 mysqld;
A bash script to reset the mysql root password
To make the process easier, I've wrapped these commands up in a script and put it on our open source respository here:
mysql_reset_root_password.sh script
Update: This script has been improved with Andy's suggestion in the comments, which is a simpler and more secure method.
killall -15 mysqld
read -s -p 'Enter a new root password: ' MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD
echo "UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD') WHERE User='root';" | mysqld --bootstrap