Run Unix command using PL/SQL

Question

Is it possible to run a Unix command using a query in Oracle?

I want to run simple commands (like df -h) using a query.

Is this at all possible or am I wasting my time? I don't want to use a different language like Java or C to call a procedure, it needs to purely PL/SQL.

Answer 1

You can use the DBMS_Scheduler

DBMS_SCHEDULER.create_program
(
program_name => 'testScript',
program_type => 'EXECUTABLE',
program_action => '/home/someone/scripts/script.sh',
number_of_arguments => 0,
enabled => TRUE,
comments => 'Just a Test'
);
end;
/

and a little hosekeeping:

exec DBMS_SCHEDULER.drop_program(PROGRAM_NAME => 'testScript');

Answer 2

I just want to share an alternative approach for calling operating system commands. In this approach a simple web-service interface is set up for calling OS commands from SQL or PL/SQL. Details about this approach can be found here.

Using the same approach, a step-by-step description of how to invoke SQL*Loader from SQL is described here.

Please note that in the above approach the web-service is defined in Python. Python comes pre-installed with most common Linux distributions (including Oracle Linux), however if you are on a Windows platform you may need to install Python 2.7.3