At Hotsos Symposium Training Day I used rlwrap with sqlplus – which gives nice command line editing and history capabilities for tools like sqlplus. Additionally I pre-generated commonly used Oracle keywords, data dictionary view and package names into rlwrap wordfile, so I got nice tab-completion too. Sqlplus sucks much less with rlwrap ;-)
It’s relatively easy to install rlwrap on Unix (there are rlwrap RPMs out there, Solaris freeware packages and I installed it on Mac via macports.org). Just google around…
You can have rlwrap on Windows too – As rlwrap has been coded for Unix flavors, then on Windows you need to run it on a Unix library environment emulator – like Cygwin.
Dave Herring and Michael Paddock have both written an article about how to get rlwrap & sqlplus running on Windows, check out the articles here. It’s worth reading both as they have different additions…
So, if you want command line history, search and tab completion for sqlplus on Unix flavors or Windows, check these articles out!
http://daveherringsdbablog.blogspot.com/2010/03/sqlplus-command-history-with-cygwin.html
http://blog.enkitec.com/2010/04/29/using-sqlplus-with-rlwrap-on-ms-windows/
