Mark, your command failed on my AIX 5.3 running 9.2 on the term Release and also on a 10.2 system we have on another server (Also AIX 5.3L). I tried version instead and got some information back: $ strings `which oracle` | grep -i version òˤNLSRTL Version 9.2.0.6.0 - Production $ strings `which oracle` | grep -i version AW$VERSION10.1.0.3 NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.3.0 - Production It looks like the version and maybe platform is an issue for what you can try on the OS command line. -- Mark D Powell -- Phone (313) 592-5148 ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark W. Farnham Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 5:53 PM To: jkstill@xxxxxxxxx; fuadar@xxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Version of Oracle Database without connecting to the database. Are we allowed to connect to the server and know which oracle binary file is running or set $PATH the way it would be after . oraenv is run? Then, for example, strings `which oracle` | grep Release | grep 'Oracle Database' | grep -v % will report a string like: Oracle Database 11g Release 11.1.0.0.0 - Production I think this works pretty far back, but I haven't tested it except on 11g today. Of course this probably requires more horsepower than connecting and selecting from v$instance, but maybe you're not concerned about the horsepower. Just be sure you don't look at any of those strings you might see without a tight grep filter or you might be "reverse engineering the product." I would never look at the strings in the Oracle binary, of course, and I just guessed that 'Oracle Database' and Release would scope it down for you. (And I figured you didn't want the one with the format string, just the literal text one....) Regards, mwf ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jared Still Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 4:53 PM To: fuadar@xxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Version of Oracle Database without connecting to the database. Here's yet another way: grep -iE 'RDBMS version number|RDBMS release number' $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/dbmsutil.sql version constant pls_integer := 9; -- RDBMS version number release constant pls_integer := 2; -- RDBMS release number Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Fuad Arshad <fuadar@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 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. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l