And to indulge my "but is that what you should be doing?" personality flaw^H^H^H^Htrait - is it worth mentioning that doing Oracle->text file rings alarm bells?

You want the data in a text file so it can be processed by a batch job. Is the batch job already written? If not, why not code it in perl and go directly to the Oracle DB? Lose the text file entirely.

If the batch job is already written, then is it complex? Is it possible to re-implement in perl, instead of implementing the oracle->text thing? I kind of dislike tempfiles etc since they tend to cause intermittent problems/require admin overhead. (Oh...the /blah disk is full....hmm...what are all these oracle.YYMMDDHHMMSS.txt files?)

It's a practical extraction and _reporting_ language...:-)