MySQL my.cnf file - Found option without preceding group

I'm trying to connect to my DB in Ubuntu remotely but I receive error message when trying to mysql -u root -p:

Found option without preceding group in config file: /etc/mysql/my.cnf at line: 1

my.cnf looks like:

[mysqld]
user        = mysql
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
port        = 3306
basedir     = /usr
datadir     = /var/lib/mysql
tmpdir      = /tmp
bind-address        =  0.0.0.0
key_buffer      = 16M
max_allowed_packet  = 16M
thread_stack        = 192K
thread_cache_size       = 8
myisam-recover         = BACKUP
query_cache_limit   = 1M
query_cache_size        = 16M
log_error                = /var/log/mysql/error.log
expire_logs_days    = 10
max_binlog_size         = 100M

[client]
port        = 3306
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

[mysqld_safe]
socket      = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
nice        = 0

[mysqldump]
quick
quote-names
max_allowed_packet  = 16M

[mysql]

[isamchk]
key_buffer      = 16M

Missing config header

Just add [mysqld] as first line in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file.

Example

[mysqld]
default-time-zone = "+08:00"

Afterwards, remember to restart your MySQL Service.

sudo mysqld stop
sudo mysqld start

Charset encoding

Check the charset encoding of the file. Make sure that it is in ASCII.

Use the od command to see if there is a UTF-8 BOM at the beginning, for example.

it is because of letters or digit infront of [mysqld] just check the leeters or digit anything is not required before [mysqld]

it may be something like

0[mysqld] then this error will occur

What worked for me:

• Open my.ini with Notepad++
• Encoding --> convert to ANSI
• save