Situation: you want to take a mysqldump with all table-names that match a particular pattern, but you don’t want all the tables.
Here’s how:
root@serv: ~$ mysqldump YOURDBNAME $(mysql -D YOURDBNAME -Bse "SHOW TABLES LIKE 'table_pattern_%'") > /tmp/database-dump.sql
You can modifity the SHOW TABLES LIKE query to include all the table names that you want.