import sql into local wp installation

i’ve searched the other posts on this matter but haven’t been able to find an answer to this specific question:

last night, i installed a clean version of wordpress 1.5 locally on my mac powerbook so i could test out the new features and everything is up and running fine with the one default post showing. now, i just want to import my backup .sql database so i can see all of my old posts but i don’t know how to do so. i tried some plugins but i couldn’t get them to work, nor could i find a good answer on the internet.

now my real blog on the net is running on wordpress 1.2.1 on a remote server and last night, i went into phpadmin and successfully exported a .sql backup file. is there an easy way to just import that .sql file locally on my mac localhost installation? does anyone know a terminal command or something like that to interact with mysql? i know nothing about this but i really need to verify that my backup is complete and that i can in fact go from 1.2 to 1.5 without issue.

thanks so much.