RE: UTL_FILE

Thanks Tom, Tom and Andreas. I was dreading that answer. At least now I can present this info with various options. I did get most of what I needed via DBMS_OUTPUT, however, that is not a good long-term solution.  

I noticed the TEXT_IO package and that will be interesting to pursue. I'm relatively new to Forms but it can't be that hard, right :)  

Eric Harrington  

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:Andreas.Haunschmidt_at_voestalpine.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 4:10 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L  

Hi Eric!

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 8:30 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Any help would be appreciated...

Is it possible to write a file to the local OS if the database is remote? Should I be using UTL_FILE or another package?

Not possible as far as I know with UTL_FILE. Some Oracle client software
(e.g.: Forms) uses a similar

package 'TEXT_IO', which allows access to local ( client side ) files.

I'm attempting to write to a file on my local OS (Windows NT 4.0). The database version is 9i r2 and resides on a HP-UX box. I've created a directory object as follows:

CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY utl_file_dir AS 'c:\';

The directory you with files for UTL_FILE access must

be on the server side (your HP-UX box).

So you could do something like

CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY utl_file_dir AS '/tmp';

The pathname of the file should respect the server's OS conventions, on

UNIX you don't use drive letters like 'c:', the UNIX directory separator is '/' not '\'

This is why you get ORA-29280.

Of course you could mount a remote share (NFS, SAMBA for MS-Windows...)

on your UNIX machine to allow the Oracle server to read/write files,

but I'd prefer local drives ( bad performance, network problems...).

The output from the SQL statement: select * from all_directories; follows:

OWNER DIRECTORY_NAME DIRECTORY_PATH

• ------------------------------ ----------------------------

SYS UTL_FILE_DIR c:\

File handle code from my procedure follows:

  l_FileHandle := UTL_FILE.FOPEN('UTL_FILE_DIR','role.txt','r');

When executing the associated procedure I get the following error:

ORA-29280: invalid directory path

Thanks, Eric Harrington  

regards

    Andreas

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Author: Harrington, Eric
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