Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
> A better way would be to learn how to query information_schema that
> *should* be portable.

Well, I don't know about portable, but the MySql manual is wrong in its
comparison.
 $list = array();
 $result = db_query("SHOW TABLES LIKE 'abc\_%'");
 while ($table = db_result($result)) {
   $list[] = $table;
 }

Worked just fine. However, to make it work with information_schema required:
 $list = array();
 $result = db_query("SELECT table_name FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE
table_name LIKE 'abc\_%'");
 while ($table = db_fetch_array($result)) {
   $list[] = $table['table_name'];
 }
 $list = array_unique($list);
 sort($list);

Note that the list had MANY duplicates in it and did not come out in order
of table name.