That is true but in my case i am going to have the oracle environment set up to always mimic the database server since this code will run on the same database server . e,.g If the database is running oracle 10 the $ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus -v will return 10 for that database which is what i want ----- Original Message ---- From: David Ballester <ballester.david@xxxxxxxxx> To: fuadar@xxxxxxxxx Cc: Bradd Piontek <piontekdd@xxxxxxxxx>; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 11:20:58 AM Subject: Re: Version of Oracle Database without connecting to the database. 2008/10/24 Fuad Arshad <fuadar@xxxxxxxxx> here is what i did to get my solution sqlplus -v | awk -F"." '{ print $1 }' | awk '{ print $NF }' the answer gives me what i was looking for Thanks all. May be I'm wrong but, sqlplus -v gives you the sqlplus binary version, not the server one. You can have a client in 11g and several databases in 11g, 10g, 9i... in the same host D.