Redirect stderr from mysqldump as well. Use &> instead of just >

Thanks! I did just that, and got the following error (which, allow me to preface, I've been having similar errors trying to make a small test site on my server of Drupal)

Enter password: mysqldump: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'jzacsh_jzacsh'@'localhost' (using password: NO) when trying to connect

Isn''t that curious... with mysqldump, you have to specify --password, not -p.

mysqldump -u jzacsh_jzacsh --password=wordpres --single-transaction jzacsh_jzwp

aah! thank you. okay, this is now what I get:

mysqldump: Got error: 1044: Access denied for user 'jzacsh_jzacsh'@'localhost' to database 'jzwp' when selecting the database
-- MySQL dump 10.11
--
-- Host: localhost    Database: jzwp
-- ------------------------------------------------------
-- Server version	5.0.81-community

/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */;
/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;
/*!40103 SET @OLD_TIME_ZONE=@@TIME_ZONE */;
/*!40103 SET TIME_ZONE='+00:00' */;
/*!40014 SET @OLD_UNIQUE_CHECKS=@@UNIQUE_CHECKS, UNIQUE_CHECKS=0 */;
/*!40014 SET @OLD_FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=@@FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS, FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_SQL_MODE=@@SQL_MODE, SQL_MODE='NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO' */;
/*!40111 SET @OLD_SQL_NOTES=@@SQL_NOTES, SQL_NOTES=0 */;

Could it be you are selecting the wrong database? Maybe internal to MySQL it is simply 'jzwp' and not 'jzacsh_jzwp' ? So the login works and you have access to your own database. But you can't switch to a non-existent database, so you get the error. But because you successfully logged in, you get the database dump as normal.

wow that's amazing! (I had been trying that previously, when I had the --password syntax incorrect). Thank you so much for sticking around! I'll be finishing a book soon on PHP & MySQL and a 2-part unix admin course... you can be sure I'll be around to support these forums!

ps.
so that others can benefit, here's what the final proper output looks like for me:

mysqldump -u uname --password=psswd --single-transaction prefix_dbname | dd bs=1M | gzip -c > $sql_Path 2>&1