RMAN is recommended for backups/restore of oracle databases.It is a very powerful tool and has variety of useful features.There is 'checksyntax' feature in RMAN which allows one to check RMAN scripts syntactically without executing it.This feature is available from 10G release 2.It proves to be useful for checking scriptsfor live databases where one doesnt have leisure to execute scripts any time and any times!!

bash-3.00$ vi rman_bkp.rman

RUN {
ALLOCATE CHANNEL c1 TYPE DISK FORMAT '/data/backup/Hotbkp_Full_%D_%d_%s_%p'; BACKUP database; RELEASE CHANNEL c1;
allocate channel c2 type dis