output

In SQLPlus you can change the default width of your output (which isn't going to help a whole lot for very wide output) from the default 80 by going

set linesize xxx

(where xxx is how wide you can go - 132, 200, whatever).

linesize can also be shortened to lines.

You can change the length of the page displayed by

set pagesize xxx

(where xxx is the height of your display and pagesize can be shortened to pages)

Also to display a "page" (based on pagesize) at a time:

set pause on

You can also do

set pause "Press Enter to contine...."

To prompt for the pressing of enter.

For extremely large output (like 70K+ rows), I often try to put the output into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of manipulation (unrelated to your question, but for wide and long output it's certainly easier to view

Hi, you can use the spool function to create an output file, like this:

spool <filename>
(your query)
spool off

If you want a CSV like output, you can set these options before you spool to a file:

set colsep ,
set pagesize 0
set linesize <somesize>
spool <filename>
etc.

if this is for browsing through data, you might want to use a data displaying tool

you could install sql developer (part of the 11 oracle client installation)
the grid displaying the data formats your columns
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/doc.112/e12152/intro.htm#RPTUG10100

or go for a more expensive solution like Toad for Oracle
http://www.quest.com/toad-for-oracle/

solved