I would like to import a tab delimited text file, where the first line of the file contains field names instead of field values.
Have you looked at the props.conf settings for CSV/TSV files? These include, but are not limited to;
[your_sourcetype]
SHOULD_LINEMERGE = false
INDEXED_EXTRACTIONS = TSV
HEADER_FIELD_LINE_NUMBER = 1
FIELD_QUOTE = "
TIMESTAMP_FIELDS = your_timestamp_field(s)
Read more in the props.conf spec file.
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0.2/Admin/Propsconf
Hope this helps,
K
6.0.2, Mac OS X (splunk-6.0.2-196940-darwin-64 running on 10.9.2)
what splunk version?