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

Look at external procedures. You write a C program, compile it as a shared object. You then use Oracle's create library command to tell Oracle about it. You'll need to setup another listener and change your tnsnames entries as well. I recommend another listener because the program runs under theas user which started the listener. On UNIX you should have a second listener under an account less privileged than "oracle".  Even with this you should only allow those commands which are absolutely necessary to be executed in this manner.

There are good articles on metalink.

Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
ian_at_slac.stanford.edu

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 4:20 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

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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