How to use vi-style editing in SQL*Plus

This post is nothing new, and I created it after a little discussion on twitter about how to use readline support in SQL*Plus. The idea is not new, and I have compiled and used rlwrap for quite some time.

At the time, Frits Hoogland asked me why I didn’t use the EPEL package-and I had to admit to myself that I didn’t know the Extra Package for Enterprise Linux repository at all. But there is more to rlwrap and Linux I didn’t know, but first things first.

Installing rlwrap from EPEL

This is really simple-you can either add the EPEL repository to your /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory or simply download the rlwrap package and install it via RPM. A simple wget on your host does the trick. You can set environment variables when you’d like to use a proxy as shown here:

$ export http_proxy=http://your.proxy.server:proxyPort/
$ export https_proxy=https://your.proxy.server:proxyPort/

Depending your release of Enterprise Linux, you can find the rlwrap package here:

• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/x86_64/repoview/rlwrap.html
• http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/repoview/rlwrap.html

Then wget should download the file for you, at the time  of writing 0.37 was current.

Compiling RLWRAP for Oracle Linux 6.1 x86-64

RLWrap is a great too to enhance the user experience with SQL*Plus by allowing it to make use of the GNU readline library. Search the Internet for RLWrap and sqlplus and you should get plenty of hits explaining how awesome that combination is.

Why am I writing this? I am currently in the process of upgrading my lab reference database server to Oracle Linux 6.1, and in the process I wanted to install the rlwrap tool to get read line support with SQLPlus. It’s actually quite simple, all I did after installing the operating system with the “database server” package is described in the few steps that follow this introduction.