RE: How does one manually corrupt a database (database file, redo logs and backups)

 overwriting the binary files, but being simpled-minded I was using vi. I thought about using the unix dd utility - unfortuantely I do not have enough experience to be surgical (easy to mess up the first few blocks, but what about the middle?).

...use dd, you can precisely scribble over an exact block, such as:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=system.dbf bs=4k seek=42 count=1

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