Hive: writing column headers to local file?

Question

Hive documentation lacking again:

I\'d like to write the results of a query to a local file as well as the names of the columns.

Does Hive support this?

Answer 1

Here's my take on it. Note, i'm not very well versed in bash, so improvements suggestions welcome :)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# works like this:
# ./get_data.sh database.table > data.csv

INPUT=$1
TABLE=${INPUT##*.}
DB=${INPUT%.*}

HEADER=`hive -e "
  set hive.cli.print.header=true;
  use $DB;
  INSERT OVERWRITE LOCAL DIRECTORY '$TABLE'
  row format delimited
  fields terminated  by ','
  SELECT * FROM $TABLE;"`

HEADER_WITHOUT_TABLE_NAME=${HEADER//$TABLE./}
echo ${HEADER_WITHOUT_TABLE_NAME//[[:space:]]/,}
cat $TABLE/*