One standout issue could be the existence of special characters (quotes (double, single), CRLF combinations, commas) within your data. These special characters may need to be transliterated (or escaped) before you dump to a file.

Another point could be that there are already numerous utilities for Sybase with regard to bulk data moves and copies.

dbunload.exe
Sybase SQL's 'output to'
Sybase SQL's 'unload to'

But I am not here to dissuade you from performing your task using Perl.


Chris
'You can't get there from here.'