Easy way to pagination from smart mysql command

When one is using a LIMIT attribute in their query ,
it's often fallowed by an OFFSET. These two togeather
are often used in pagination ( paging of results ) as in.

select * from thetable limit 10 offset 0

To find out how many rows would be available if one had not
used the LIMIT / OFFSET, one would alter the statement
above to look like this

select SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS * from thetable limit 10 offset 0

The return from both commands looks the same, so to get the
row count you need to issue a fallowup query

select FOUND_ROWS()