What is fastest way to extract large table to flat text file

We have a 3 million row table 2 gigs in size. We need to give it to customer on CD ROMS. We want to extract the table to a unix file that we can compress and burn to a CD. What is the best way to do this.

We have seen the following ideas passed around

1 - use sqlplus do a spool. Concerns are: network traffic sending it to Sqlplus, cost of having it processed for display even if we dont have it displayed, concerns about limits of how big a file it can handle.

2 - use UTL package. We have concerns about speed of handling that large a file, any feedback?

Table is on Oracle 8.1.6, Sun 10k with 6 CPUS, 4 gigs ram, 800 gigs storage. Received on Tue Jul 17 2001 - 20:15:05 CDT