Sometimes it’s necessary to read the information from the alert log together with the timestamp of the error.

The very simple Unix-shell script helps to do this:


echo
echo 'Enter # of lines:'
read NUM
tail -$NUM alert_${ORACLE_SID}.log | awk '
BEGIN {prev="" ; ret=1 }
/^(...-|Error)/ { if ( prev !~ /^(...-|Error)/ ) { print "" ; print prev;} print $0;ret=0}
{prev=$0}
END { exit ret } '


This code could be assigned to some hotkey in Your favorite telnet application, so You just need to press something like “Alt+A” to see the quick review of the recent Oracle errors.

Example:

Enter # of lines:
1000

Sep 01 19:42:06 2009
Errors in file testsrv_arc0_23486.trc:
ORA-16038: log 1 sequence# 112 cannot be archived
ORA-19502: write error on file “”, blockno (blocksize=)
ORA-00312: online log 1 thread 1: ‘redo_g1_m1.log’