scripts and hash bang ( #! )

More often than not, people have to tell the unix shell / perl scripts or other programs where lies their interpretor, e.g. write their command line calls as 

perl SomeScript.pl

or 

ruby ARubyProgram.rb

or 

sh SomeShellScript.sh

this is because the system may not be aware of the location of the the executable interpreter of the exact type that needs to be used for the corresponding script.  Well, for this purpose, windows has the file extension association concept, but we are dealing with Unix like systems not windows, so that option is not really available to us (besides, there are ill effects of that convention too, but lets not go in that discussion).

So, to tell a unix program where to find its interpreter, besides launching the script along with it on command line, there is another way, and rather beautiful at that.

Just put the exact path of your interpreter executable at the very first line of your script preceded by these two magic characters, a hash and an exclamation (#!) also called as hash-bang or shebang.  Now, once your script is marked as executable (see chmod), you are good to go, no need of putting explicit calls to the interpreter to run your code.

Basically, your code should now look like this - 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl5

print "testing hashbang with raghav"

Save this short script as aa.pl (assuming that your system has perl 5 interpreter installed in the location I used). Make the script executable (chmod) and you can just launch the script, like ./aa.pl  instead of earlier example perl aa.pl

A word of caution though, these magic characters have to be absolutely the first and second character of the file, no exceptions to that. Else, the system cant make out the special meaning of this and the purpose is lost.

Pretty neat.. hunh...

Compile all packages in a schema

BEGIN
FOR cur IN
(
SELECT OBJECT_NAME,
OBJECT_TYPE ,
owner
FROM all_objects
WHERE object_type IN('PACKAGE', 'PACKAGE BODY')
AND owner = ':OWNER
AND status = 'INVALID'
)
LOOP
BEGIN
IF cur.OBJECT_TYPE = 'PACKAGE BODY' THEN
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'alter package "' || cur.owner || '"."' || cur.OBJECT_NAME ||
'" compile body';
ELSE
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'alter ' || cur.OBJECT_TYPE || ' "' || cur.owner || '"."' ||
cur.OBJECT_NAME || '" compile';
END IF;
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('Errors compiling - ' || cur.owner ||'.'||cur.object_name);
END;
END LOOP;
END;