Re: strange sqlplus problem w/ Oracle 7.3.4

From: Stephen Harris <sweh_at_mpn.com>
Date: 9 Jan 1999 18:33:04 GMT
Message-ID: <7787d0$e9n$4@nebula.mpn.com>

Sasha Ostojic (sasha_at_UltimateTech.com) wrote:
: I do the following:

: $ sqlplus user/pass
: SQL> SPOOL $DBPATH/sql/output/tables.lst

: and I immediately get "Segmentation violation(coredump)".

: $DBPATH is an environment variable that is defined, and points to a
: directory that exists.

: Has anybody seen this before? What's going on?

SQL*Plus doesn't evaluate environment variables like this, so you are trying to open a file literally called '$DBPATH/....'.

What confuses people is things like
  sqlplus user/pass << EOF
  SPOOL $DBPATH/....
  EOF
works. However this is because the shell is evaluating the variable before SQL*Plus sees it, and so SQL*Plus actually sees the full pathname.

The SIGSEGV is a bug (IMHO) - bad error trapping in the SQL*Plus program; I assume the code isn't testing the result of the fopen() [ or open() - I haven't bother to trace this ] and is blindly writing to an unopened file descriptor. I've seen this once before but didn't think it worth raising a TAR over :-)

rgds
Stephen Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 12:33:04 CST