Version of Oracle Database without connecting to the database.

Folks,
I'm trying to find a way to script finding  an approximation of the version of 
the database without connecting to the database itself. 
The goal is to try to find out of the Oracle_home is a Oracle 10 home , 9 home 
etc . 
 
right now i'm doiing something like 
DATAVERSION1=`echo $ORACLE_HOME | awk -F/ '{print $6}'`
expecting that $6  would lead me to something like 
/usr/local/oracle/product/10.2

but this is not a very foolproof implementation since installs can take various 
forms and break this implementation. 


Any ideas of how i can get the oracle version info considering that i  will 
always know the value of $ORACLE_HOME.
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

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