Get Oracle Instant Client Working on Mac OS X Lion
CJ Travis has an excellent and thorough article on installing Oracle Instant Client on Mac OS X 10.7. The gist: you have to install the 32-bit version. As a bonus, he tells you how to download and install the handy rlwrap command line utility, which gives you the ability to navigate the statement history in SQL*Plus in a very bash-like fashion, using the up and down keys.
Make bash scripts crontab-compatible
When writing shell scripts in bash, consider whether your script can be automated in a batch scheduler like cron. If you reference any external resources in your script relative to the directory in which it resides, those references may break when running your script through cron.
By default, crontab runs scripts in the user’s home directory, as specified in /etc/passwd. For user “Tim” with home directory /home/tim, a sample crontab might look something like the following:
