Re: How to execute Unix Command/program within a pl/sql block.

Seema Singh wrote:
>
> Hi
> How to execute unix command in PL/SQL ?
> Thanks in advance.
> -Seema

You can't. The nearest you can get is to write a daemon program which waits for commands on a (dbms) pipe, executes them (popen(), while(fgets()) {}, pclose() in C) and feeds the output back to the pipe. Needless to say, it can be a serious security gap if you do not screen the commands, since you are likely to execute them with the privileges of the user under which the said program is run. Many moons ago, there used to be something named 'flex' developed by Oracle consultants and freely available on the web which was more or less doing that. It may or may not still be around. I have had a look at it after having developed my own (in Pro*Fortran and under VMS, nothing stops me - no pipe, but a /OUTPUT=... was appended to the command and I was reading and sending back the ouput file) and I can tell you that Flex was unnecessarily complicated. To make simple seems very difficult to many people.

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Stephane Faroult
Oriole Corporation
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Author: Stephane Faroult
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