Chapter 25. Setting Oracle Environments

Since the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) "runInstaller" is run from the oracle account, some environment variables must be configured for this account before OUI is started.

Execute the following commands for the Bash which is the default shell on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to verify your shell run: echo $SHELL):

su - oracle
export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_SID=orcl

The environment variables ORACLE_HOME and TNS_ADMIN should not be set. If you set these environment variables, you can unset them by running the following commands:

unset ORACLE_HOME
unset TNS_ADMIN

To have these environment variables set automatically each time you log on as oracle, you can add these environment variables to the ~oracle/.bash_profile file which is the user start up file for the Bash on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To do this you could simply copy and paste the following commands to make these settings permanent for your oracle accounts Bash shell:

su - oracle
cat >> ~oracle/.bash_profile << EOF
export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_SID=orcl
EOF