How to output MySQL query results in csv format?

2448

Is there an easy way to run a MySQL query from the linux command line and output the results in csv format?

Here's what I'm doing now:

mysql -u uid -ppwd -D dbname << EOQ | sed -e 's/        /,/g' | tee list.csv
select id, concat("\"",name,"\"") as name
from students
EOQ

It gets messy when there are a lot of columns that need to be surrounded by quotes, or if there are quotes in the results that need to be escaped.

SELECT order_id,product_name,qty
FROM orders
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/orders.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

Using this command columns names will not be exported.

$ mysql your_database --password=foo < my_requests.sql > out.csv

Which is tab separated. Pipe it like that to get a true CSV (thanks @therefromhere):

... .sql | sed 's/\t/,/g' > out.csv

linux