Best way to handle Oracle shutdowns from Unix script

This is a real newbie question, but what is the best way to shutdown and startup the oracle server from a Unix script (running SCO Enterprise Server 3.0 with Oracle 7.1). I want to do a full system backup automatically on Saturday night, and so I want to create a script that I can run in cron that will shutdown the oracle server, run the backup program, and start the server up again. Are there concerns about someone leaving a client application running with a transaction partly finished when the shutdown happens?

And by the way, how do you get help for programs like "exp" from the command line (i.e. something like "exp -?" that would give you the command line options).

Thanks,

Mark Day Received on Mon Oct 13 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT