The Oracle (tm) Users' Co-Operative FAQ
(UNIX) I can't run SQL*Plus and all the other tools on the server unless I connect as the 'oracle' unix account - why not ?
| Author's name: Connor McDonald
Author's Email: connor_mcdonald@yahoo.com |
Date written: August 22, 2001 Oracle version(s): 7.3+ |
| (UNIX) I can't run SQL*Plus and all the other tools on the server unless I connect as the 'oracle' unix account - why not ? |
Unlike many Unix programs, it is not just sufficient to have 'sqlplus' (or any of the other oracle binaries) in the Unix PATH for everything to work nicely. An appropriate environment must be created for the tools to work. Typically, on most Unixes, Oracle will create two programs "coraenv" and "oraenv" (for C-shell and bourne/korn shell respectively), which can be sourced in to set the appropriate environment variables.
In the absence of these (most commonly caused by people not bothering to run the root.sh script at the end of an Oracle install), the key variables that are usually needed are:
- ORACLE_HOME
- ORACLE_SID
- LD_LIBRARY_PATH (typically $ORACLE_HOME/lib)
- PATH (typically the existing path plus $ORACLE_HOME/bin)
- ORA_NLS33, NLS_LANG (this being dependent on the character set and language options in use)
Other errors that have popped up with older Oracle versions have been the 'oracle' executable missing the setuid bit or having the wrong permissions altogether.
Further reading: N/A
