Output from SQL*Plus to tab-separated file

From: PhilHibbs <snarks_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:53:46 -0000
Message-ID: <1188316426.246623.49290@50g2000hsm.googlegroups.com>

Is there an easy way to output the contents of a table as a tab- separated file from SQL*Plus? Currently I have something like this:

SET NEWPAGE 0
SET SPACE 0
SET LINESIZE 4000
SET PAGESIZE 0
SET ECHO OFF
SET FEEDBACK OFF
SET VERIFY OFF
SET HEADING OFF
SET MARKUP HTML OFF SPOOL OFF SET TERMOUT OFF
SPOOL Header.txt

SELECT         OBJECT_TASK_HEADER  -- VARCHAR2(1)


  || CHR(9) || CATEGORY            -- VARCHAR2(1)

  || CHR(9) || GROUPING            -- VARCHAR2(4)

  || CHR(9) || PARTNERTYPE         -- VARCHAR2(4)

  || CHR(9) || AUTHORIZATIONGROUP  -- VARCHAR2(4)

  || CHR(9) || CENTRAL_BLOCK       -- VARCHAR2(1)

  || CHR(9) || TITLE_KEY           -- VARCHAR2(4)

  || CHR(9) || PARTNEREXTERNAL     -- VARCHAR2(20)

  FROM header;

This produces my output, but with redundant trailing spaces. Ideally
I'd just like to turn off column padding and do a SELECT * on the
table, but I can't see a way of doing that.

I would rather not create separate SQL*Loader scripts for each table,

I'd rather do all the tables in a single SQL*Plus script.

Any ideas?

Phil Hibbs. Received on Tue Aug 28 2007 - 10:53:46 CDT