Re: SHOW VARIABLES: which table holds my.cnf startup varibles?

[Rick James]

If you are accessing them from Perl/PHP/etc, SHOW VARIABLES feels like a table with 2 columns and a couple hundred rows.

If you are trying to copy them into a table, consider:
SELECT * FROM information_schema.GLOBAL_VARIABLES;

There is also SESSION_VARIABLES.

At the moment I see 5 differences on my server. 4 came from doing SET NAMES utf8; the other is PSEUDO_THREAD_ID (re: PROCESSLIST).