Re: Question about Oracle Datafiles on Solaris

Nowhere in my post did I actually say I was "worried" about it.....I was just more curious than anything else, and was actually asked by a Sys Admin, and couldn't explain it.

Sybrand Bakker wrote:

> "kipnukdog" <kipnukdog_at_netscape.net> wrote in message
> news:3ABA3F4B.82FCB75_at_netscape.net...
> > Running Oracle (both 8.0.5 and 8.1.6) on Solaris 2.6 and 2.7
> > respectively.
> >
> > I have a very simple question....
> > When doing a Unix "file" command against Oracle datafiles, some return a
> > status of "data" , others return a status
> > of "ASCII text".
> >
> > Could someone explain this to me, as I don't understand why there is a
> > difference, and what the difference means, if anything.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
>
> Why would you bother?
> the file command works with so-called 'magic codes'
> (as you might be aware put #!/usr/bin/ksh in a shell script,and file will
> recognize this as a Korn Shell script. If you don't put the line in, file
> won't recognize the script).
> This means the output of file is highly independable.
> So accidentally Oracle put the magic byte for ascii text in the location
> file uses to interpret the data.
> So why worry? There are far more important things in Oracle to deal with.
>
> Hth,
>
> Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA
  Received on Thu Mar 22 2001 - 13:45:43 CST