This is an example of an export of selected tables with the Oracle DB command exp:

Parfile:

BUFFER=100000
TABLES=(table1,table2,table3)
FILE=/path/to/exportfile.dmp
LOG=/path/to/logfile.log

Let’s name this file ‘export.conf’

Command:

exp <user>/<password>@<sid> PARFILE=export.conf

This will export all data needed to recreate the tables: table1, table2 and table3 into exportfile.dmp. This file can later be used with the imp command to restore the tables

To see more options of the exp command try:

exp help=y

This will show you a list of commands and settings

Since this is quite a cumbersome operation (in contrast to for example with MySQL) I have put together a script to modify and use every time I need to dump some table data to a CSV file.
NOTE: This only works with text and simple number fields. More complex field types will just come out truncated or as gibberish.

SET echo off
SET feedback off
SET linesize 100
SET pagesize 0
SET sqlprompt ''
SET trimspool on
SPOOL filename.csv

SELECT field1 || ',' || field2 || ',' || field3 FROM tablename;

SPOOL off
exit

As you can see the trick is to turn off any extra output and to use the string concatenation operator|,|to insert commas (or any separator you want) between the fields.

The SPOOL command opens a file and dump all output made until the SPOOL off command

To run the script use:

sqlplus <user>/<password>@<SID> @scriptname.sql

Tested with SQL*Plus: Release 10.1.0.2.0