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Everyone knows you can use phpmyadmin to import and export data to and from Mysql. I needed to be able to do this programaitcally and fast. I use Drupal so could have written a module to read the data from the table and then write out to a file line by line, this would be slow and my tables are large. So I found this method which is native MYSQL and is really efficent.

  SELECT columnname,anothercoulmnname INTO OUTFILE filename.csv FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|' ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' FROM tablename;

This will dump out a file to the mysql folder holding the datafiles. You can supply a path at filename.csv i.v. /home/me/files/filename.csv to send it to a specific destination but you will have to make sure that MYSQL has privileges to write to the directory.