The UNIX wc command - cat, grep, commands Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The UNIX wc command

You can use the wordcount command (wc) to display the number of words or lines in a UNIX file. The wc command is very useful for the Oracle DBA who is looking to monitor the contents of specific messages with the Oracle alert log.

To illustrate, let’s count the number of words in out Oracle alert log

root> cat alert_envtest.log|wc
108313 741411 5334959

Here we see that our Oracle alert log has 180,313 lines, 741,411 words and 5,334,959 characters. We can use the wc –l option to only display the number of lines on a file.

root> cat alert_envtest.log|wc -l

108313

We can also use wc –l command to count the number of specific messages in the Oracle alert log. Here we display the text of all ORA-600 errors in our alert .log using the cat and grep commands.

root> cat alert_envtest.log|grep ORA-00600
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [2655], [0], [1], [], [], []
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [16365], [2208470888], [1], [4]
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [16365], [2209886568], [0], [4]

The above is an excerpt from the "Oracle9i UNIX Administration Handbook" by Oracle press, authored by Donald K. Burleson.