The conclusion seems to be that there is no setting that will allow me to create a tab-delimited file directly from the select statement without listing each column and concatenating tabs between them. However, Stephane Faroult and Prem Khanna J both provided me with solutions that select from the user_tab_columns table to create a "select column_name||'||chr(9)||'...." command for each table. Since they already sent their responses to the list, I won't include them here. Mladen also responded and suggested ... a Perl script, of course! Many thanks! -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l