Multiple FORMAT Commands on One Line in SQLPlus

[jtanner]

Hello,

Though I have read the the docs over and over, I cannot determine how to place more than one COL\FORMAT command on one line in a standard .sql script to be run from SQLPlus.

COL emp FORMAT a20
COL location FORMAT a10[/color blue]

Using a semi-colon between entries does not work.
COL emp FORMAT a20;COL location FORMAT a10[/color red]

What can you recommend?


Thanks,

JT

 

[Dagon]

Why do you need to do that ?

 

[KenCunningham]

It looks as if you're expecting SQLPlus to behave like a shell command line?

I want to be good, is that not enough?

 

[jtanner]

Dagon, Ken,

Yep, I am firing SQL (and SQLPlus) from a shell script.

In most language you can place multiple commands on one line. As a rule of thumb, of course, this is something you do not want to abuse.

Can it be done?

If not I guess I can put my FORMAT commands in a .login or .glogin (yuck).


JT

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Why not put them in the Sql script on separate lines?
That should not prevent you from calling the script from the shell..







To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[Dagon]

I don't understand why you would need to put your format commands in a login script. Are you trying to pass the entire SQL*Plus set of commands through a single UNIX variable or something like that ?

If you want to pass multiple lines to sql*plus and don't want to have a separate sql script file, you can use a technique like the following:

sqlplus un/pw@db << EOF
COL emp FORMAT a20
COL location FORMAT a10
select emp, location from table;

EOF