Is there a way to use mysqldump without a shell session?

I'd like to use mysqldump to back开发者_如何学Python up my database and have written a script to do this by dropping into a shell and issuing a mysqldump statement. Is there a way to get the same dump but without using a shell? Isn't there a way I can use straight SQL to do this?

You can select the raw data into an outfile (using SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE), but I don't believe there's a way of doing a full 'schema with inserts' style dump.