I’ve worked in so many environments where the Oracle environment variables are not set correctly. Especially all the preinstalled Virtualbox instances floating on the interwebs.
Consequence is that tools like sqlplus cannot be found from the command line or don’t work at all. There’s no need for that, because the solution is really, really easy. There’s a little script called oracle_env in the bin directory (usually something like /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/bin) that sets it all right for you.
When you add the following line to the .bash_profile in your home directory, all parameters will be set when you log in.
. /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/bin/oracle_env.sh
Don’t forget the dot and space at the beginning of the line.
Although this information is mentioned in the installation guide, I thought it might be worth mentioning.
