Every person who ever worked with bash tab auto complete
know how fast and convenient it is to use .
but when it comes to Oracle sqlplus under Linux there is no such thing as tab completion
on most cases even the arrow keys doesn’t work . in the simple following steps
we will fix all that by using a tool called rlwrap .
in this post i used CentOS because it is similar to RedHat
but before we can compile we need to solve some dependencies first .
rlwrap depends on GNU lib named readline , let compile this one first
yum install ncurses-devel.i386 libtermcap-devel.i386 wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-6.2.tar.gz tar -xzvf readline-6.2.tar.gz cd readline-6.2/ ./configure make && make install echo "/usr/local/lib/" >>/etc/ld.so.conf ldconfig
now we are ready to to compile rlwrap ,
wget http://utopia.knoware.nl/~hlub/rlwrap/rlwrap-0.37.tar.gz tar -xzvf rlwrap-0.37.tar.gz cd rlwrap-0.37/ ./configure make && make install
After rlwrap is installed we can start using it . note that it will save the commands
history under the user home directory so don’t use login with passwords .
using rlwrap is simple as starting it before running sqlplus
rlwrap sqlplus myuser/
but there will be no tab auto complete …. well here is the trick ,
rlwrap can take a lists of auto complete words list as a file .
so just create the a file containing all words you wish to auto complete and
just run it
rlwrap -f ~/my_completions sqlplus myuser/
note :
you can put all Oracle dictionary on that file ,all your schema objects
along with all PL/SQL commands