This section describes how to use mysqldump to create delimited-
text dump files. For information about reloading such dump
files, see Section 7.4.4, “Reloading Delimited-Text Format
Backups”. If you invoke mysqldump with the option, it uses
dir_name as the output directory and dumps tables individually
in that directory using two files for each table. The table name
is the basename for these files. For a table named files are
named CREATE TABLE statement for the table. The .txt file
contains the table data, one line per table row. The following
command dumps the contents of the db1 database to files in the
mysqldump --tab=/tmp db1 .txt files containing table data are
written by the server, so they are owned by the system account
used for running the server. The server uses SELECT ... INTO
OUTFILE to write the files, so you must have the FILE privilege
to perform this operation, and an error occurs if a given .txt
file already exists. It is best that --tab be used only for
dumping a local server. If you use it