Just get column names from hive table

Question

I know that you can get column names from a table via the following trick in hive:

hive> set hive.cli.print.header=true;
hive> select * from tablename         


        

Answer 1

use desc tablename from Hive CLI or beeline to get all the column names. If you want the column names in a file then run the below command from the shell.

$ hive -e 'desc dbname.tablename;' > ~/columnnames.txt

where dbname is the name of the Hive database where your table is residing You can find the file columnnames.txt in your root directory.

$cd ~
$ls