Error while restoring a Database from an SQL dump

I am extremely new to MySQL and am running it on Windows. I am trying to restore a Database from a dumpfile in MySQL, but I get the following error:

$ >mysql -u root -p -h localhost -D database -o < dump.sql
ERROR: ASCII '\0' appeared in the statement, but this is not allowed unless option --binary-mode is enabled and mysql is run in non-interactive mode. Set --binary-mode to 1 if ASCII '\0' is expected. Query: 'SQLite format 3'.

I tried $ > mysql -u root -p -h localhost -D database --binary-mode -o < dump.sql but this gave me the following ERROR at line 1: Unknown command '\☻'.
It is a 500 Mb dump file, and when I view its contents using gVIM, all I can see is expressions and data which is not comprehensible. Also when I try to copy contents from the file to post here all I can copy is :SQLite format 3 This kind of seems strange.

The reference to --binary-mode (introduced in MySQL 5.6.3) is probably a distraction.

It doesn't sound like you're dealing with a mysqldump output file, there. Try the file utility.

shell> file dumpfile.sql
dumpfile.sql: ASCII text

If you don't get the ASCII text response, you're dealing with either something that isn't a dump file from mysqldump at all, or you're dealing with something that's been compressed (with gzip or bzip2, for example), which you'd need to uncompress before piping it into mysql.

If you see SQLite 3.x database then you definitely have your answer... it's a raw SQLite database, not a MySQL dump file.

Indeed, the first few bytes of a SQLite database are these:

53 51 4C 69 74 65 20 66  SQLite f
6F 72 6D 61 74 20 33 00  ormat 3^@

Note that the 16th octet here is 0x00, explaining the ERROR: ASCII '\0' appeared in the statement... message in this case. The suggestion that --binary-mode is appropriate is a false alarm.

Windows users: the 'file' utility is a tool from Unix, but the Windows version can be found here.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#44721, answer score: 21