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.