Your code on the sqlplus line got zapped. Happens to me too when my posting contains a less-than sign. In the following sample code, I will show less-than-sign as X to avoid getting zapped like yours did.

In solution 1, sqlplus sends its output to both the spooled file and stdout, which is piped into the grep. (When I spool, I prefer to set termout off to suppress stdout, then I follow sqlplus with a grep of the spooled file.) Anyway, we capture the output of this (the ORA- lines) into the variable x.

#!/bin/ksh
x=`sqlplus -s scott/tiger XX EOF | grep '^ORA-'
spool myreport
select * from kk
/
exit
EOF`

echo $x

This could capture multiple lines since many times a single error results in multiple ORA- errors being displayed. If you want to capture just the first word of each line, then add the cut:

#!/bin/ksh
x=`sqlplus -s scott/tiger XX EOF | grep '^ORA-' | cut -d: -f1
select * from kk
/
exit
EOF`

echo error codes: $x

Output from above would be like:

error codes: ORA-00001 ORA-00002

These solutions make use of nesting one unix command within another by using backquotes, such as:

echo "My current directory is `pwd`"

If you are just trying to detect and react to critical errors, your sqlplus code can start with:

whenever sqlerror exit failure

and after exiting sqlplus, check status of $?.