Small Changes can Break Stuff i.e 11.2 ASMCMD

This is a going to be a small post justo to reiterate the fact that Oracle Keeps changing things on us to keep us moving .

In Oracle 11 ASMCMD introduced md_backup and md_restore to help with managing ASM Metadata.

To script around this and make our scripts universal we used


asmcmd -v to detect version and then proceed with backups.



So in 11.1.0.7

oracle@abc:$ asmcmd -v 
asmcmd version 11.1.0.6.0 

When i migrated to 11.2.0 for ASM my scripts for metadata backup Started failing

running the same command in 11.2.0 netted

oracle@abc:$ asmcmd -v

WARNING: Tracing levelnot specified

Default level of tracing is enabled.

ASMCMD> exit

In 11.2.0 to get version from ASM is

oracle@abc:$ asmcmd -V

asmcmd version 11.2.0.2.0

Not sure if this behaviour changed in 11.2.0.1 or 11.2.0.2 .


Although it would be nice if Oracle would not reuse the same flag for something else just makes our lives and scripts miserable.