PHP filter - Foe but in rare unique cases Friend
click to enlarge image.
I am not proud of this but share it in hopes of showing the vulnerabilities of the PHP filter and in great contradiction how useful it was in one unique case.
I have preached every chance I get about turning off the PHP filter that ships with Drupal. It is notoriously abused by newbies we don't learn to write modules and just make block after block with PHP code in it. It is this endless preaching that most likely made it difficult for me to see it as a solution to my unusual problem.
I use MAMP, not exclusively but it is a helpful tool. I changed the password on my root account and locked myself out. Most of the documentation I was looking at to solve this problem was for native installations of MySQL. I had a lot of trouble interpreting things into MAMP.