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Archive for August, 2014

Wrapping SQL*Plus

without comments

One annoying thing from installing Oracle Database 11g on Fedora, was that the up arrows for command history didn’t work. I decided to fix that today after seeing Lutz Hartmann’s article on rlwrap. Unfortunately, the epel (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) package he recommended doesn’t run on Fedora 20. You can read my tale of woe, or skip to the .bashrc function that fixed it when I installed only rlwrap.

Attempting it on yum, gave me these errors:

# yum install http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm                                 |  14 kB  00:00     
Examining /var/tmp/yum-root-5CLTPa/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm: epel-release-6-8.noarch
Marking /var/tmp/yum-root-5CLTPa/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm to be installed
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package epel-release.noarch 0:6-8 will be installed
--> Processing Conflict: epel-release-6-8.noarch conflicts fedora-release
No package matched to upgrade: epel-release
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: epel-release conflicts with fedora-release-20-3.noarch
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles –nodigest

Poking around for an epel fix wasn’t successful, so I chose to install only the rlwrap package. Here’s that command and log file:

[root@localhost ~]# yum install rlwrap 
Loaded plugins: langpacks, protectbase, refresh-packagekit
0 packages excluded due to repository protections
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package rlwrap.x86_64 0:0.41-1.fc20 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
 
Dependencies Resolved
 
================================================================================
 Package         Arch            Version                 Repository        Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 rlwrap          x86_64          0.41-1.fc20             updates           95 k
 
Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install  1 Package
 
Total download size: 95 k
Installed size: 204 k
Is this ok [y/d/N]: y
Downloading packages:
rlwrap-0.41-1.fc20.x86_64.rpm                               |  95 kB  00:00     
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction (shutdown inhibited)
  Installing : rlwrap-0.41-1.fc20.x86_64                                    1/1 
  Verifying  : rlwrap-0.41-1.fc20.x86_64                                    1/1 
 
Installed:
  rlwrap.x86_64 0:0.41-1.fc20                                                   
Complete!

The next step was getting it to work. A sqlplus function wrapper inside the .bashrc file seemed the easiest. Here’s the code to the .bashrc file:

# .bashrc
 
# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
	. /etc/bashrc
fi
 
# Uncomment the following line if you don't like systemctl's auto-paging feature:
# export SYSTEMD_PAGER=
 
# User specific aliases and functions
. /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/bin/oracle_env.sh
 
# Wrap sqlplus with rlwrap to edit prior lines.
sqlplus()
{
  if [ "$RLWRAP" = "0" ]; then
    sqlplus "$@"
  else
    rlwrap sqlplus "$@"
  fi
}
 
# Set vi as a command line editor.
set -o vi

As always, I hope this helps some folks.

Written by maclochlainn

August 20th, 2014 at 6:58 pm