Ray, Since Oracle v7 if you stated to Oracle that you had a sym link they would walk away. Sym links can be a good thing if you are careful. We use them frequently. We tried installing 10r2 OEM and it aborted due to our sym links. Re : Symbolic (Soft) Link Usage for oracle home ( ORACLE_HOME ) Value https://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/f?p=200:27:126792149666654937 82::::p27_id,p27_show_header,p27_show_help:617811.992,1,1 -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ray Stell Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 12:42 PM To: oracle-l Subject: symlinks/OUI I discovered I had a corrupted oraInventory. I was not able to install or delete software. Somewhere in the discussion with ora support the analyst said, "OUI doesn't handle symlinks well," suggesting that my use of a symlink to oracle_home may have caused the corruption. I did find things like this in oraInventory/logs/oraInstallxxx.err: Ignoring Exception during de-installoracle.sysman.oii.oiil.OiilDeinstallException: Unable to delete file /opt/app/oracle/product/9.2.0/lib/stubs/libc.so and sure enough, this directory structure here is a symlink." Is this documented? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l