Thesqldump: dump several tables from db. what will be locked

Just reading the header you put in the question shows something interesting. In fact, the question shows three things:

1. MySQL dump 10.13 Distrib 5.1.34, for apple-darwin9.5.0 (i386) indicates you used mysqldump from apple-darwin9.5.0 (i386) binaries
2. Server version 5.0.51a-24+lenny2 shows the version of mysql you used mysqldump to dump from.
3. You wanted to load the mysqldump file into Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.1.57, for apple-darwin10.3.0 (i386) using readline 5.1

What a jumble of versions to do this with.

If you want to see if mysqldump has an issue with the line that has DATEDIFF, try dumping just the schema.

mysqldump --no-data --all-databases ... > MySQLSchema.sql

This will display ony the schema. No INSERTs will be in the output. You can then hunt down that lines. You may also want to dump the data onyl without the schema,

mysqldump --no-create-info --all-databases ... > MySQLData.sql

Splitting the dumps allows you to load the schema into an editor and see if there are any problems. If you do not see any problems, load the MySQLSchema.sql into the target server. If the error is reproduced, you can fix the schema file and reload. Once the schema is loaded, you can separate load MySQLData.sql

BTW you should use mysqldump binary whose version is 5.0.51a-24+lenny2. Use dumps from version as mysqld is usually better to port and may minimize problems like this.

Give it a Try !!!

If all you are getting is the header of the mysqldump, an error must be posted somewhere. In order to make the errors show up on demand, please run the dump like this:

mysqldump -u[username] -p[password] -h[hostname] zm3_quizzes 2>zm3_quizzes.err | gzip > [backup file path]

This should post the stderr of the mysqldump to zm3_quizzes.err.