Re: Control Chars in Filename

Yong Huang wrote:

> I suppose you could put something like this in a PL/SQL block:
>
> execute immediate 'alter database datafile ' || chr(somenumber) || ...
> || ' offline drop';
>
> where somenumber is the ASCII code for the control character.

Good advice.

Yes. The thought doing something like that did cross my mind, but did not now what the ASCII codes were. What cause my brain to slip into neutral was that the SELECT returned a filename without control characters... it was only the alert log that showed differently. What I should have done is decoded the filename in the SELECT to show what actually was in that column, without the tty STDOUT interfering and processing the control characters (which caused the filename to look okay).

Hindsight is always perfect. :-)

BTW, I just remember now that I once had a similar problem on WinNT some years ago. A bug in the program caused the filename to be softspaces (char 255 I think). This was accepted as a valid NTFS filename. But detecting that file and deleting or renaming it, was a mission.

But hey, then it is the bugs and the problems that make the job interesting. :-)

--
Billy