Parsing Oracle errors with a ksh function Some time ago I wrote a small routine to run some quick n' dirty queries (and with that I mean it is not used for large queries) against an Oracle DB, but also wanted to do it a bit easier to parse errors.

# Executes the query
#
# Will execute a query contained in the variable named
# in the parameter $4 and store the result in the variable
# named in $5.
# In case of errors (even SQL related) the function should 
# exit with status 1, making it possible to "if execQuery".
# 
# @param    $1 = User
#           $2 = Pasword
#           $3 = Tns Alias
#           $4 = Name of the variable containing the query
#           $5 = Name of the variable to hold the result
#
# @return   query execution status
function execQuery {
    typeset eSQLU=$1
    typeset eSQLP=$2
    typeset eSQLS=$3
    typeset etQUERY=$4
    eval typeset eQUERY=\$$etQUERY
    typeset eQRES=$5
    logMessageFile "DEBUG" "Query: $eQUERY"

    typeset res=$(sqlplus -s $eSQLU/$eSQLP@$eSQLS &lt;&lt;EOF
set echo off newpage 0 space 0 pagesize 0 feed off head off verify off lines 999
WHENEVER SQLERROR EXIT 1
$eQUERY
exit;
EOF
)
    [[ $? -gt 0 ]] &amp;&amp; return 1 || eval "$eQRES=\"$res\""

}


The idea of this function is that later I could do something like:

query="select sysdate from dual;"
if execQuery $RAID_APP_PI_USR $RAID_APP_PI_PWD $RAID_APP_PI_SID query result ; then
    echo $result
    logMessageFile "INFO" "Inserts into XX successful."
else
    logMessageFile "ERROR" "Error insertando XXX."
fi


It kinda works. A properly written query will do it fine, and the result variable is all correctly evaluated and all. The problem are the errors. If the query in that example was something like select * potato potato;, It'd still not yield the correct return value thus missing the error test.

I'm not particularly good with SQL*Plus nor ksh and am probably just missing something obvious. Could someone lend me a hand here?
It seems like you might find this clause helpful:

WHENEVER SQLERROR EXIT SQL.SQLCODE