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document updated 11 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