Pete, I can just hear the programmers at Oracle howling in protest "That's expected behavior". And having written a fair number of C and KSH scripts that handle command line parameters I can understand. It's far easier, and less error prone, to remove code than to put in handlers when you obsolete something. Just cut it out & let the default error handler take it. I will agree though that it's less customer friendly. Dick Goulet Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Leader -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Peter Hitchman Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 5:15 AM To: oracle-l Subject: Really annoying change to 11.2 sqlplus Hi, Letting off some steam here. I just moved a Oracle client to 11.2, having done a set of tests with JDBC, PERL DBI, sqlplus etc etc. So far one shell script has had a problem, because it used the "-F" option with sqlplus, which has disappeared in the 11.2.0.2.0 version. Searching MOS I find that the "-F" was only ever there to workaround a bug whereby sqlplus was not failing over in a RAC situation and now that the bug is fixed the option is no longer needed. But the person or persons involved could of least just changed sqlplus to ignore the option/print a "deprecated" message, instead of removing it as a valid option so that the result is the usage message! Regards Pete -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l