Firstly, many thanks to everyone who gave me advice about truncating event logs and listener logs - much appreciated. I've been experimenting with the various options of Oracle Import and Export (with Oracle 8i and 9i), and have come across a strange problem: The syntax of imp and exp specifies that you can invoke them as SYSDBA by starting the statement thus: exp username/password AS SYSDBA ... but when I try this out on a Solaris system I get: LRM-00108: invalid positional parameter value 'as' Then I noticed a note in the documentation for Export, saying that because the string "AS SYSDBA" contains a blank, most operating systems require the entire string 'username/password AS SYDBA' be placed in quotation marks or marked as a literal by some method. It also says the quotation marks may need to be preceded by an escape character. So I tried: exp "username/password AS SYSDBA" ... and still got the LRM-00108 message as before. Now, I've tried looking in the documentation for anything about escape characters, but can find nothing.=20 Can anyone using Oracle under Solaris tell me where I'm going wrong, please? And, yes, I know generally there's no need to ever use the "as sysdba" option for import/export, but I'm just experimenting, and this is a mystery I'd like to clear up. Thanks, Paul Vincent DBA UCE Birmingham paul.vincent@xxxxxxxxx -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l