Root Password Change - How can I stop the mysqld in the mariadb container

Hi, I am using the mariadb container with podman, and in order to make it run, I need to pass in mysql_root_password as an environment variable. I am not entirely convinced that this is secure, as the root password is then both left in an environment variable inside the container (which is exposed to localhost inside a pod), and is recorded as part of the command line to podman run, in the file referenced by the podman inspect command, which outputs a json string with the root password recorded in the commandline arguments. So, since I can't hide that command line, I thought I would try and change the root users password, obtaining the password from user input in a script that would then issue a set of podman exec commands to stop mysqld, start mysqld_safe etc However, I can't find a way of stopping mysqld without it restarting. Is there a way to do this? Or to start the mariadb container and not pass the database root password in an environment variable? MTIA