Re: i can't start MySQL from CMD windows 8.1

[Rick James]

Correction... default-character-set seems to live on in tools other than mysqld. But in mysqld it was long-ago replaced by character-set-server.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysqldump.html
"supports the following options, which can be specified on the command line or in the [mysqldump] and [client] groups of an option file."

In general, anything that can be on a commandline (mysqldump, mysqld, etc) can also be in the appropriate 'group' ([mysqldump], [mysqld], etc) in my.cnf, optionally replacing '-' with '_'.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_default-character-set
points out that default-character-set was deprecated in 5.0.0 in favor of character-set-server; then removed in 5.5.