I'm a newly apointed DBA at my job and the SR. DBA is out. Our alert logs are larger than we'd like to have them.

Can I save off the current alter log by renaming it (to .old) while the database is up and running? Will Oracle create another alert log
dynamically when it needs to if it doesn't exists?

We are on a Solaris system running Oracle 8.0.6 and 8.1.7.


Thanks,
smoothyc