Philip, Sweet! I just got a chance to try it out. In reading the AIX docs, I think I understand what is going on here, but I am a little uncertain about the double-dash. Is the following correct? !& creates the co-process or piped background process. cat <&p & creates the background job that redirects all the co-process ouput to the 'cat' command, which gets output to my display. print -p -- writes the argument enclosed in quotes to the co-process. The part I'm not completely sure about is the double-dash (--). The AIX man page for ksh is very sparse. I went to publib.boulder.ibm.com/.../korn_shell_enhanced.htm under "Coproces facility", but didn't find any help there. I did find some info under the getopts command that makes me think the double-dash is just a kind of terminator that says "don't check for any more options after -p. Is that correct? Thanks, David On 5/22/07, Philip Douglass <philipsd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here's what I've been using for awhile now to accomplish the repetitive monitoring script in SQL*Plus pattern: <snip> It doesn't get much shorter than that!