Why doesn't mysqlshow work for databases or tables with underscores in their names?
mysqlshow has a tricky feature that interprets SQL wildcard characters (*,?,%,_) as wildcards if they appear in the last argument you give it. While the first 3 characters don’t get used much (if at all) in naming databases, the underscore is a common word separator and could cause problems if you try to use mysqlshow. Instead of showing the details of a database or table, if the object of interest has an underscore in its name, mysqlshow will treat it as a search and display only the name of the one object it finds.
The trick to getting mysqlshow to display details is to add another argument at the end. mysqlshow only interprets wildcards in its last argument, so adding another one will tell the command to interpret the underscores literally and not as expressions for a search.
To get the database underscores_are_great to show its tables, type:mysqlshow underscores_are_great %
The ‘%’ on the end is a wildcard which will show all tables, which is what you want it to do.
This works for displaying individual tables too, just add a ‘%’ as a final argument.