Re: oracle password file

Mladen Gogala wrote:
>
> Unrelated to your post, Oracle used to support a shell variable or a
> logical in VMS called ORA_PWFILE or ORA_SID_PWFILE which was pointing
> to a non-default password file location. As the following shows, this is
> no longer supported:
>
> $ strings $ORACLE_HOME/bin/oracle|egrep "ORA_.*PWFILE"|wc -l
> 0
> $
>
> Does anybody here know why was that de-supported?

Using strings to check this is an interesting idea. I tried that on 9.2.0.7 Oracle on Linux and didn't find the string. But "ORA_%s_PWFILE" and "ORA_PWFILE" both exist in 9.2, 10.1 and 10.2 Oracle.exe on Windows. According to the message in forum thread 175222.995 (dated Jan-02), ORA_PWFILE and ORA_SID_PWFILE have some problems on UNIX. That may be why they're dropped from UNIX. According to an older thread 97750.999, they're not available to UNIX at all. Searching for "ORA_PWFILE" on tahiti.oracle.com returns hits only pointing to Windows admin guide in 10g, and Windows admin guide plus ORA-1990 error message in 9i. Although tahiti doesn't find it, the two variables are indeed used in VMS as well.

Yong Huang Received on Sat Oct 29 2005 - 21:01:03 CDT