How to get column names of a table using the bcp utility in Sybase?

BCP program or the bulk copy program utility is used to extract data from a table into a flat file but can we have the column names of a table along with the table's data in the file?

The bcp utility does not offer a switch to extract column name so we need to have a workaround to achieve the same and what could that be? So, to tackle this situation here is Views to the rescue. To explain this concept we will be creating a table Employee with the following definition -

create table Employee
(
   EmpId int,
   EmpName varchar(100),
   Age int,
   Salary float
)
go

Now, we will create the following view -

create view V as
select
  "EmpId",
  "EmpName",
  "Age",
  "Salary"
from
  Employee
where 1=1
union
select
  convert(varchar, EmpId),
  EmpName,
  convert(varchar, Age),
  convert(varchar, Salary)
from
  Employee
go

As we can see here that we have created a view V which will do a union of column names and columns data. On executing this view we get the column name and the data both in a single resultset.

Now what remains is running the bcp command to extract the data to a flat file and the command to accomplish this is as follows -

bcp Database.Owner.ViewName out FilePath -SSERVERNAME -UUSERNAME -PPASSWORD -c -t,

and thats it.. We will get the column name and the data in a flat file simply by creating a view. Isn't it simple?