Gfix Commands

Note

In the following discussion, I use the full parameter names in all examples. This is not necessary as each command can be abbreviated. When the command is shown with '[' and ']' in the name then these are the optional characters.

For example, the command -validate is shown as -v[alidate] and so can be specified as -v, -va, -val and so on up to the full -validate version.

For almost all of the options in the following sections, two of the above command line options will be required. These are -u[ser] and -pa[ssword]. These can be supplied for every command as parameters on the command line, or can be configured once in a pair of environment variables.

-u[ser] username

Allows the username of the SYSDBA user, or the owner of the database to be specified This need not be supplied if the ISC_USER environment variable has been defined and has the correct value.
-pa[ssword] password

Supplies the password for the username specified above. This need not be supplied if the ISC_PASSWORD environment variable has been defined and have the correct value.

To define the username and password as environment variables on a Linux system:

linux> export ISC_USER=sysdba
linux> export ISC_PASSWORD=masterkey

Alternatively, on Windows:

C:\> set ISC_USER=sysdba
C:\> set ISC_PASSWORD=masterkey

Warning

This is very insecure as it allows anyone who can access your session the ability to perform DBA functions that you might not want to allow.

-u[ser] default user name
-pa[ssword] default password

If you have not defined the above environment variables, some commands will not work unless you supply -u[ser] and -pa[ssword] on the command line. For example:

linux> gfix -validate my_employee
linux> Unable to perform operation. You must be either SYSDBA -
or owner of the database

Note

The line that starts with 'Unable to perform' above, has had to be split to fit on the page of the PDF file. In reality, it is a single line.

However, passing the username and password works:

linux> gfix -validate my_employee -user sysdba -password masterkey

Warning

Anyone on the same Linux or Unix server where you are running the above command may be able to use the ps command and view the password you have used.

You will notice, hopefully, that some commands do not give any printed output at all. gfix, in the main, only reports when problems are encountered. Always check the response code returned by gfix to be sure that it worked. However, see the caveats section below for details because it looks like the response code is always zero.

Note

When logging into a database on a remote server, you will always be required to pass the -u[ser] and -pa[ssword] parameters.