+1 nice catch, dimitre. this was almost certainly the problem, vincent - not a sqlplus typo but a shell scripting typo. unix shell variables will lose whitespace unless you put them inside double quotes. On 9/22/2011 3:57 PM, Radoulov, Dimitre wrote: > On 22/09/2011 22:43, Laurent, Vincent wrote: >> echo $DUMP > echo "$DUMP" > > Regards > Dimitre -- http://www.ardentperf.com +1 312-725-9249 Jeremy Schneider Chicago -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l