Scripting UNIX Commands

The ability to take a basic UNIX command and chain it with other commands is a fundamental principal in UNIX shell programming for Oracle.

UNIX -exec and xargs commands will apply a single UNIX command to a list of inputs.  It is possible to quickly generate a UNIX script to perform a powerful task.

 Assume the goal is to create a UNIX script that searches every file on the UNIX server for a file that contains a reference to the dba_2pc_pending view. 

The first step is to write a command that will display all file names on the server.  UNIX makes this simple:

root> find . -print
./sql/pl2.sql
./sql/plcur.sql
./sql/check.ksh
./sql/mts.lst
./sql/fix_ts.sql
./sql/d.sql
./tools/sessions.sql
./tools/connections.sql
./tools/flush_shared_pool.sql
./tools/currently_running.sql
./tools/inval_obj.sql
./tools/recomp.sql
./tools/sqlnet.log
./statspack/r.ksh
./statspack/rpt_8i_bhr_dy.sql
./tmp/t1.sql
./tmp/t2.sql
./tmp/t3.sql
./tmp/n3.sql
./tmp/i2.sql
./ext_routines/common.mk
./ext_routines/common_OCI.c
./ext_routines/common_PROC.pc

Now that the complete list of all of the UNIX files is available, the UNIX xargs command can be used to search each file for the Oracle table name in all SQL files.

This is possible because the grep commands accepts file names as an argument.

 In this case, the whole Oracle UNIX directory structure is searched and all scripts that reference the dba_2pc_pending view can be found.

root> find . -print|grep sql|xargs grep -i dba_2pc_pending
./sql/PENDING.sql:from   dba_2pc_pending

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