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document updated 9 years ago, on Aug 26, 2014

Oracle releases something called the "Oracle Instant Client" which is nice, in that it requires very little work by the sysadmin to install. [1] [2] [3] [4] Unfortunately, it does require users to do a little work to load it into their environment.

setup

Generally, you will need to setup these environment variables:

$ORACLE_HOME
$LD_LIBRARY_PATH $LIBPATH	$LIBPATH if you're on AIX, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH everywhere else
$TNS_ADMIN	if your tnsnames.ora is located somewhere other than $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/
$PERL5LIB	if you have Perl scripts that need to use DBD::Oracle
$PATH	add "$ORACLE_HOME/bin/"

TODO: explain how I find the proper values of these

clear settings

To clear the Oracle settings from your environment (for instance, before you load some different settings), run:

export PATH="$( echo "$PATH" | perl -F: -nale 'print join(":", grep { ! /\Q$ENV{ORACLE_HOME}\E/i } @F )' )"
export PERL5LIB="$( echo "$PERL5LIB" | perl -F: -nale 'print join(":", grep { ! /\Q$ENV{ORACLE_HOME}\E/i } @F )' )"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$( echo "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" | perl -F: -nale 'print join(":", grep { ! /\Q$ENV{ORACLE_HOME}\E/i } @F )' )"
unset ORACLE_HOME TNS_ADMIN