Running unix commands from within a procedure

Question

Oracle 11.1, AIX 6.1
================
A developer would like to know what the commands are to execute from within a procedure to run unix commands on the database server and capture those results back to the procedure for parsing & manipulation.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Don't take this as the correct way to do it, but this is merely 'a' way to do it:
have a db procedure thats executes a db function
create or replace procedure csproc(p_cmd in varchar2)
as
x number;
begin
x:=csfunc(p_cmd);
dbms_output.put_line('x is: '||x);
end;
/The function calls a piece of java to execute the os command and return the return code of the os command
create or replace function csfunc( p_cmd  in varchar2) return number
as language java
name 'csclass.RunThis(java.lang.String[]) return integer';
/Here is the java class to run the os command
create or replace and compile java source
named "csclass"
as
import java.io.*;
import java.lang.*;
public class csclass extends Object
public static int RunThis(String[] args)
   Runtime rt = Runtime.getRuntime();
    int        rc = -1;
    try
       Process p = rt.exec(args[0]);
      int bufSize = 4096;
       BufferedInputStream bis =
       new BufferedInputStream(p.getInputStream(), bufSize);
       int len;
       byte buffer[] = new byte[bufSize];
       // Echo back what the program spit out
       while ((len = bis.read(buffer, 0, bufSize)) != -1)
          System.out.write(buffer, 0, len);
       rc = p.waitFor();
    catch (Exception e)
       e.printStackTrace();
       rc = -1;
    finally
       return rc;
/and finally the os command - in this case its a very simple shell script
#!/usr/bin/ksh
echo "Hi" >> /app/oracle/workdir/cs.logwill have to grant privileges to my user 'CS' to run the various os commands
exec dbms_java.grant_permission('CS','java.io.FilePermission','/app/oracle/workdir/cs.ksh','read,execute');
exec dbms_java.grant_permission('CS','java.io.FilePermission','/app/oracle/workdir/cs.log','write');
exec dbms_java.grant_permission('CS','SYS:java.lang.RuntimePermission','*','readFileDescriptor');
exec dbms_java.grant_permission('CS','SYS:java.lang.RuntimePermission','*','writeFileDescriptor');and finally can run the procedure from within the db
set serveroutput on
exec dbms_java.set_output(1000000);
exec csproc('/app/oracle/workdir/cs.ksh');
x is: 0
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.to prove it works ok the logfile shows an entry:
'Hi'