Problem

You want to export a MySQL database table as a csv with something like:

mysql> select * from table_name into outfile '/tmp/table_name.csv';

but you get the error that MySQL cannot execute this command.

Solution

Find out the location that MySQL can use to export files by running the following:

mysql> show variables like 'secure_file_priv';
+------------------+-----------------------+
| Variable_name    | Value                 |
+------------------+-----------------------+
| secure_file_priv | /var/lib/mysql-files/ |
+------------------+-----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

and then use the path to change the outfile path (ie /var/lib/mysql-files/table_name.csv).

Taken from the answer here