From the manual: The SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE
statement is intended primarily to let you very quickly dump a table to a text file on the server machine. If you want to create the resulting file on some client host other than the server host, you cannot use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE
. In that case, you should instead use a command such as mysql -e "SELECT ..." > file_name
to generate the file on the client host."
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/select.html
An example:
mysql -h my.db.com -u usrname--password=pass db_name -e 'SELECT foo FROM bar' > /tmp/myfile.txt