Confused about RMAN Functioning

Greetings,

I find myself puzzled about how RMAN is functioning. I'm running 10gR2
on RHEL3. My backup script does the following (lots of stuff which I
will leave out but is not relevant). The relevant piece is this...

sqlplus -s / << EOF
  ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO '<file_spec>';
  quit
EOF

$RMAN target / nocatalog <<EOF
RUN {
  ALLOCATE CHANNEL disk1 DEVICE TYPE DISK;
  BACKUP INCREMENTAL LEVEL=${_BK_LEVEL} FORMAT '<file_spec>'
FILESPERSET=64 AS COMPRESSED BACKUPSET DATABASE;
  SQL 'ALTER SYSTEM ARCHIVE LOG CURRENT';
  BACKUP FORMAT '<file_spec>' ARCHIVELOG ALL DELETE INPUT;
  BACKUP FORMAT '<file_spec>' CURRENT CONTROLFILE;
  RELEASE CHANNEL disk1;
}
EOF

Everything is fine, I have tested restores and all works as expected. My
confusion is regarding the difference between the rman commands...

RMAN> list copy of controlfile;
RMAN> list backup of controlfile;

The copy lists the file created by the...

ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO '<file_spec>'; 

command and list backup of controlfile displays the file created by
the...

BACKUP FORMAT '<file_spec>' CURRENT CONTROLFILE; 

command. I don't understand the difference between the copy and the
backup and how RMAN is tracking and using these two pieces. If anyone
can explain I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman@xxxxxxxxxxx
(530) 754-6208
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

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