This one was a pain in the ass. It seems like pre-Oracle 10g SQL will not always run on 10g. The construct in question is : whenever oserror exit failure In 10g, this will fail with the error message : O/S Message: No such file or directory Thanks to the Annals of Oracle’s Improbable Errors website for helping out with this. The solution in my case was to comment it out, but it might not always be so easy.
I was stuck on a machine with a lot of scripts that had the dreaded ^M at the end of each line. These were Windows files in a huge zip file, and it was a pain to use the FTP to move that zip file over again. Dos2unix wasn’t installed, nor was perl. One way out of this is by creating the following script, called transform.sh : tr -d \\r <$1 >$1.
The following options are useful in SQLplus when spooling to a file. They make sure there are no headers or other stuff in the output that does not execute in SQLPlus. -- Do not print the number of records selected, updated, .. set feedback off -- Do not print column headings set heading off -- Do not print old and new when substituting set show off -- Removes blanks at the end of spooled lines set trimspool on -- surpress output of scripts run with @, @@ or start set termout off -- Setting pagesize to 0 suppresses all headings, page breaks, -- titles, the initial blank line, and other formatting information.
If you want to loop over values in a file, the read command in Linux/Unix is very useful. It reads a line from a file, and assigns as many variables as you specify as parameters to the values in that line. Combined with a while loop, you can read the values and process them. Here’s an example : while read customernr do <some_script> $customernr done < customers.txt This loops over all the lines in the customers.
Sometimes, especially if your terminal is not set correctly, you accidentally create files that have backspace in their name. To see the full name, you can use the -b option to ls : > ls -b gjdhjd\177\177.txt This file has 2 backspace characters in the name, they are shown as \177. That will give you the full name, which you can use to delete or rename the file. If you want to delete these files, you can use the -i option to ls.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michel Hollands