Donald K. Burleson Oracle Tips

Useful UNIX scripts to clean-up old trace and log files

Here is an example of a UNIX script for keeping the archived redo log directory free of elderly files.  As we know, it is important to keep room in this directory, because Oracle may “lock-up” if it cannot write a current redo log to the archived redo log filesystem. This script could be used in coordination with Oracle Recovery Manager (rman) to only remove files after a full backup has been taken.

#!/bin/ksh
# Cleanup archive logs more than 7 days old
find /u01/app/oracle/admin/mysid/arch/arch_mysid*.arc -ctime +7 -exec rm {} ;

Now that we see how to do the cleanup for an individual directory, we can easily expand this approach to loop through every Oracle database name on the server (by using the oratab file), and remove the files from each directory. If you are using Solaris the oratab is located in /var/opt/oratab while HP/UX and AIX have the oratab file in the /etc directory.

#!/bin/ksh
for ORACLE_SID in `cat /etc/oratab|egrep ':N|:Y'|grep -v \*|cut -f1 -d':'`
do
   ORACLE_HOME=`cat /etc/oratab|grep ^$ORACLE_SID:|cut -d":" -f2`
   DBA=`echo $ORACLE_HOME | sed -e 's:/product/.*::g'`/admin
   find $DBA/$ORACLE_SID/bdump -name \*.trc -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;
   $DBA/$ORACLE_SID/udump -name \*.trc -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;
   find $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/audit -name \*.aud -mtime +14 -exec rm {} \;
done

The above script loops through each database, visiting the bdump, udump and audit directories, removing all files more than 2 weeks old.

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