Trust me, you really, really, really do not want to roll your own table-to-file application - specially not if you are new to Perl.

First, there is the utility bcp that comes with Sybase. You can use that. And if you really want to use Perl and not a seperate process, get yourself sybperl and use Sybase::BCP. The DBI isn't the only interface available to connect to databases, there are more, which don't restrict themselves to common lowest denominator.

-- Abigail