Need your help pls...

I have integrated my shell script with sqlplus statements that will fetch necessary data for the rest of the script. As observed, sometimes problems at the oracle database occurs wherein users can not login via sqlplus, so does the script. During execution, the logging of username and password will be rejected and will be asked 3 times before exit. But the script will only login once that is why, the scripts hangs and is unable to continue.

Is there anyway that I can specify so that at logon it will only prompt me once and if error occurs it will exit immediately?

Thanks.