Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi. I'm trying to find the best way to locate the latest version of Oracle on a Linux host.

There could be multiple SW installs or there could be none. It could be a client or a full RDBMS installation. I need to find and set the environment in order to run the sqlplus binary. Rather than just running a find command, is there a smarter way? Many thanks.

---------- Post updated at 10:34 PM ---------- Previous update was at 09:58 PM ----------

Up until now I've used this command:

Code:

SQLPLUS_BINARY=$(find /u01 -name sqlplus -type f 2>/dev/null | sort -n | sed -n 1p)

but there must be a more elegant way to do this.

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags when displaying sample input, sample output, and code segments.

If there are multiple installs, you might start with querying the package manager. For APT, try dpkg -l, perhaps piped into a grep -i ORACLE or similar / adequate keywords.

Oracle has a tool - $ORACLE_HOME/bin.tnsping. You should have it installed on your desktop machine if you have an oracle client install.

This will tell you if you connect to a server on a remote host - i.e., does one exist and is it up. sqlplus binary exists on any box that has either the client software set or the server software set. So, locating sqlplus in each $ORACLE_HOME on a machine tells you the instance name(s). e.g., /u01/blah/blah/bin/sqlplus , plus it shows the version as well.

If you want to connect to every server you can (you need passwords and usernames) see, you should consider having all of the versions like 9, 10, 11 client installed on the box doing the searching.

I should've mentioned that I won't know the $ORACLE_HOME setting. There may actually be no Oracle SW on there. It's a Linux VM and the script won't be run as the oracle user. I need to work out the ORACLE_HOME from scratch on whichever host the script is run on. Connecting to a DB afterwards is straightforward. But how can my script determine the correct HOME? I think I need to check the Oracle Inventory ... oraInst.loc

---------- Post updated at 12:17 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:57 AM ----------

This command will list all Oracle inventory files:

Code:

locate oraInst.loc

You could simply use the id command. If oracle is installed on a UNIX box, that box has an oracle user id, unless someone did something against oracle installation instructions.

Code:

while read remote
do
   echo "$remote"
   ssh user@$remote 'id oracle &&  locate oraInst.loc  || echo "not OK" '
done < list_of_servers.txt  > report.txt

Thanks for that. Trouble is, there will definitely be an Oracle account on the host but there may be no Oracle SW installed.

In the cases where the SW is installed, more than likely there will multiple SW installations and the 'locate' cmd will return many records. I'd need to know which is the latest valid installation and an actual RDBMS or client installation ... there could also be some Oracle SW plugin entries.

I'm only interested in checking the local host (it's part of a script that gets rolled out there), so I won't be looping through a server list. I can use the find command mentioned earlier and just check the timestamps of the multiple sqlplus binaries. Was just hoping there was a more elegant way to do it.

I haven't had a system with more than one database running for some times (virtualisation does that to a system) but you might look at the file /etc/oratab for the relevant information. It should tell you exactly what you want.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

PS: ¡No pasarán!