Shell scripting gotchas

• If strange behavior is encountered running an existing (working) script, your default shell may differ.  At the top of the script, you may need to explicitly set your shell, e.g. change #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash
• Whitespace is very important to the declaration of variables, that is:

numSections = 0;

attempts to execute a command named numSections whereas

numSections=0;

declares a variable of name numSections 

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Executing Oracle stored procedure with TOAD

In this example, the stored procedure returns a ref_cursor based on some input parameters.  In a TOAD Editor window, have something like this: 

select MySchema.MyPackage.MyStoredProcedure('param1', 'param2') from dual

and click on .

You will get results as a 1 by 1 grid, a concatenation of all the results, created by TOAD.