Recovery Manager: 04 executing commands from shell scripts

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First of all... what is a shell ?
A shell is a command interpreter: when you issue commands to the Unix operating system they are translated into a form the kernel (a software layer able to communicate with the hardware layer to complete tasks such as writing to disk or using a printer) can understand and returns the results to you.
Users direct the operation of the computer by entering command input as text for a shell to execute.

In the Unix operating system there are available many types of shell, but they work fundamentally in the same ways. Since in the Unix operating system users can select which shell they want to use (which program should execute when they login), many shells have been developed:

• sh: The Bourne shell, written by Steven Bourne. It is the original UNIX shell.The Bourne shell was the shell used in early versions of Unix and became a de facto standard; every Unix-like system has at least one shell compatible with the Bourne shell. The Bourne shell program is located in the UNIX file hierarchy at /bin/sh
• csh: The C shell, a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system, uses syntax similar to the C programming language. The C shell added many feature improvements over the Bourne shell, such as aliases and command history.
• ksh: The Korn shell, a Unix shell developed by David Korn, is considered a superset of the Bourne shell. The main advantage of ksh over the traditional Unix shell is in its use as a programming language. Since its conception, several features were gradually added, while maintaining strong backwards compatibility with the Bourne shell.
• bash: The Bourne Again Shell is the Linux default shell which includes features of the Bourne shell as well as the Korn, C, and TCSH shells.
  

It is possible to invoke any available shell from within another shell. To start a new shell, you
simply type the name of the shell you want to run, ksh, csh, or sh. It is also possible to set the default startup shell for all your future sessions. The default shell for your account is stored in the system database /etc/passwd, along with the other information about your account. To change your default shell, use the chsh command.

And now... what is a shell script ?
A shell script is simply a file containing a set of commands. The shell script looks just like any regular UNIX file, but it contains commands or conditional (if-then, while-do, until-do) statements that can be executed by the shell.

Now... let's go to analyse the following Rman shell script:
The EOF text strings act as markers that tell Unix that any commands between the EOFs are commands associated with the command to the immediate left... in our case... the rman command.
If RMAN encounters an error, it returns a nonzero exit code that is evaluated within the shell script.

#!/bin/ksh
#----------------------------------------------
export TARGET_CONN=sys/oracle
#----------------------------------------------
rman <<EOF

# Connect to the target and the catalog
connect target ${TARGET_CONN}
# Run the backup command.
run { allocate channel d1 type disk;
backup as compressed backupset datafile 4; }
EOF

#Test for success of RMAN operation
if [ $? -ne 0 ];
then
echo "RMAN shell script completed with problems..."
else
echo "RMAN shell script successful completed..."
fi
#----------------------------------------------
exit



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