In RDS instances the FILE privilege for MySQL is not applicable

Typically in MySQL instances that run on standalone EC2 boxes or local installs, you can set FILE privileges to write a SQL query to write the output into a local flat file such as

$mysql -u$MyUSER -p$MyPASS -h$MyHOST --port=$MyPORT --socket=$MySOCKET -e "select name, username, email, registerDate, lastvisitDate from TestDB.Employee where username not like 'TestUser' INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/dbout.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '\"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';"

In RDS instance, the above query won't work because we don't have access to local file system of RDS, so "/tmp/dbout.csv" cannot be created. You will see an error like

"ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user '<rds_user'@'%' (using password:YES)"

Instead, you would have to run the query with "--execute" switch on the remote EC2 instance and dump the query results to a flat file by separating out the results using "sed" utility as documented on AWS developer forum - threadID=41443

$mysql -u$MyUSER -p$MyPASS -h$MyHOST --port=$MyPORT --socket=$MySOCKET -e "select name, username, email, registerDate, lastvisitDate from TestDB.Employee where username not like 'TestUser';" | sed 's/\t/","/g;s/^/"/;s/$/"/;s/\n//g'  >/tmp/dbout.csv