Expanding on the answer given by Jeff It is now possbile to use pandas without actually reading any rows.
In [1]: import pandas as pd
In [2]: import numpy as np
In [3]: pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(10, 4), columns=list('abcd')).to_csv('test.csv', mode="w")
In [4]: pd.read_csv('test.csv', index_col=0, nrows=0).columns.tolist()
Out[4]: ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
pandas can have the advantage that it deals more gracefully with CSV encodings.