Change output format for MySQL command line results to CSV

As a partial answer: mysql -N -B -e "select people, places from things"

-N tells it not to print column headers. -B is "batch mode", and uses tabs to separate fields.

If tab separated values won't suffice, see this Stackoverflow Q&A.

The above solutions only work in special cases. You'll get yourself into all kinds of trouble with embedded commas, embedded quotes, other things that make CSV hard in the general case.

Do yourself a favor and use a general solution - do it right and you'll never have to think about it again. One very strong solution is the csvkit command line utilities - available for all operating systems via Python. Install via pip install csvkit. This will give you correct CSV data:

    mysql -e "select people, places from things" | csvcut -t

That produces comma-separated data with the header still in place. To drop the header row:

    mysql -e "select people, places from things" | csvcut -t | tail -n +2

That produces what the OP requested.

I wound up writing my own command-line tool to take care of this. It's similar to cut, except it knows what to do with quoted fields, etc. This tool, paired with @Jimothy's answer, allows me to get a headerless CSV from a remote MySQL server I have no filesystem access to onto my local machine with this command:

$ mysql -N -e "select people, places from things" | csvm -i '\t' -o ','
Bill,"Raleigh, NC"

csvmaster on github