Spool Command: Do not output SQL statement to file

Question

I am wanting to output a Query to a CSV file and am using the below as a small test;

spool c:\test.csv 
select /*csv*/ username, user_id, created from all_users;
spool off;

but the output has the actual select statment as the first line

> select /*csv*/ username    user_id     created from all_users
USERNAME    USER_ID CREATED
REPORT  52  11-Sep-13
WEBFOCUS    51  18-Sep-12

Is there a way to prevent this? I tried SET Heading Off thinking that might do it, but it did not change. I am using SQL Developer an running as script.

Thanks Bruce

Answer 1

Unfortunately SQL Developer doesn't fully honour the set echo off command that would (appear to) solve this in SQL*Plus.

The only workaround I've found for this is to save what you're doing as a script, e.g. test.sql with:

set echo off
spool c:\test.csv 
select /*csv*/ username, user_id, created from all_users;
spool off;

And then from SQL Developer, only have a call to that script:

@test.sql

And run that as a script (F5).

Saving as a script file shouldn't be much of a hardship anyway for anything other than an ad hoc query; and running that with @ instead of opening the script and running it directly is only a bit of a pain.

---

A bit of searching found the same solution on the SQL Developer forum, and the development team suggest it's intentional behaviour to mimic what SQL*Plus does; you need to run a script with @ there too in order to hide the query text.

Answer 2

My shell script calls the sql file and executes it. The spool output had the SQL query at the beginning followed by the query result.

This did not resolve my problem:

set echo off

This resolved my problem:

set verify off

Answer 3

Just for anyone who stumbles upon this (after 7+ years) ...

This works for me ... adapt it to your way of invoking sqlplus.

sqlplus -s / as sysdba 2>&1 > /dev/null <<EOF
  whenever sqlerror exit sql.sqlcode;
  set echo off 
  set verify off
  set feedback off
  set term off
  set head off
  set pages 1000
  set lines 200

  spool /tmp/whatever.output
  
  ### Your_SQL_statement_here ###
  example: select sysdate from dual;
  example: select * from V\$LOGFILE;

  spool off
EOF

-s flag here is the key to not displaying the SQL statements when runing a script.