sql parser that accepts statements on stdin?

        is there some tool (or hidden switch on sqlplus) that will connect to an oracle db in a unix environment and run commands that were passed to it on stdin, as opposed to being read from a file? i've got a lot of tasks that i would like to automate, but which require dynamically building many of the statements to be run and/or making ddl statements, so straight pl/sql won't work. i've taken a glance at the dbms_sql package, and would rather just use my existing knowledge of other scripting languages like perl to build all of the statements and then just execute them once, rather than learning the dbms_sql syntax (i'm suffering from a bit of syntax overload as it is, and one more won't help). i would really rather not depend on temp files, however, for both security and data integrity reasons, and can't figure out any way to get my commands to actually execute without writing them out to a file and then having sqlplus read them.

        tia for any suggestions.

• sweth.

--
Sweth Chandramouli
IS Coordinator, The George Washington University <sweth_at_gwu.edu> / (202) 994 - 8521 (V) / (202) 994 - 0458 (F) <a href="http://astaroth.nit.gwu.edu/~sweth/disc.html">*</a> Received on Wed Dec 02 1998 - 10:25:45 CST