Sometimes you just need to grab a few records from a table when using mysqldump. Here's the syntax for doing that with a simple condition:
mysqldump -u [username] -h [host] -w "condition" -p [database] [table] > [output file]
I've used this successfully when needing to copy records, or insert new records with slightly different fields. You can use a text editor on the resulting file to make mass changes to the sql.