Some here is something I found interesting - if I truss a sqlplus "alter system" call in any other database, I get results like the following: 2801: access("./alert_TEMQA.log", F_OK) Err#2 ENOENT 2801: access("/u01/app/oracle/local/bin/alert_TEMQA.log", F_OK) Err#2 ENOENT 2801: open("/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/temqa/TEMQA/trace/alert_TEMQA.log", O_WRONLY|O_APPEND|O_CREAT|O_LARGEFILE, 0660) = 11 I would be curious if you all get the same thing. I used "truss -aefo some_output_filename sqlplus / as sysdba" and did something like "alter system set timed_statistics=TRUE;". I find it interesting that Oracle is always (always?) looking for ./alert_$SID.log first. Where exactly is ./ ? Next it looks in another directory defined in our PATH. Note how both attempts to access the alert.log result in Err#2 ENOENT. However, in my bizarre example with TEMDEV the first access does not produce an error, which implies that Oracle found the file at ./ Is there some kind of logic in the code which says "if -e ./alert.log then skip_everything_else"? -- Charles Schultz