Can the Oracle DB access the file system?

I know Oracle fairly well, but not much about the platform or environment that hosts our Oracle 8i database. It's an HP UNIX server of some sort. I've been asked to investigate if it is possible for database programs to call (i.e. execute) UNIX shell scripts. I thought there was a package that allowed the database access to the file system. Can anyone elaborate? Is this a possibility? The idea is that we have the job scheduler kick off a job that runs every night; that job would be a procedure that just executes a shell script and then determines whether the script succeeded or failed.

Does any of this sound feasible? What's required? Thanks in advance.

--jk Received on Tue Oct 09 2001 - 20:02:06 CDT