Glad to help. I suppose someone who is better with regular expressions could have done it with one grep and a giant glob of expression. But writing something with multiple greps made it easier to write in a incremental fashion. I have written a lot of scripts that read a file listing server names, or the oratab file and loops through doing something for each record.

I have public/private authentication setup accross all my database servers. So I wrote a script that will copy one or more files to every database server. So if I change by hot backup script I can copy it to every server with one command.

Adding tools just makes the job easier, and in my humble opinion less boring since there is less mindless work.

LKBrwn_DBA have you thought about using either open LDAP or OID for resolving your database names? We have always just used the tns names file, but will probably start using Open LDAP soon.