When I was installing 11gR1 in our production environment, it gently reminded me that Oracle recommends not having your login directory be ORACLE_BASE which is unfortunately the standard for the company I support (of course, it gives you a YES and NO button but doesn't actually ask you a question...but I digress). It reminded me that one night I was setting permissions for archive logs for an auditing tool to mine and I accidentally set the ORACLE_BASE directory to read only. Every database, listener, agent, etc. went down simultaneously. My lesson was to know where you are before you do any "global" action. -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of April Sims Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 11:42 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: major blunders Compiling a list of major blunders to avoid: Don't use the number 8 for scripting or ORACLE_SID due to the wild card character * above it. Don't use rm *.* .... Anyone else have some to contribute? thanks April Sims SELECT IOUG Contributing Editor http://aprilcsims.wordpress.com OCP 8i, 9i, 10g DBA Southern Utah University sims@xxxxxxx 940-484-4276 -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l