sqlplus Wrapper Script For Linux

Installed Oracle 10g on RHEL5 x86_64 today and the sqlplus command prompt was driving me bats. This post gave some great tips on fixing sqlplus behavior. I combined them in one shell script to fix the backspace issue and the lack of history.


First, as the root user, install rlwrap. It should be a simple download, untar, then configure; make install; as root.

Once rlwrap is installed and working, create sqlplus.sh as the user who is going to be running sqlplus (change ~/ to whatever path you deem appropriate for the script):


#!/bin/bash
stty erase ^H
rlwrap sqlplus $@
stty erase ^?


Make the script executable:
chmod 0755 ~/sqlplus.sh

And in ~/.bashrc, add

alias sqlplus=’~/sqlplus.sh’


Voilà! Your Linux sqlplus prompt should now be a bit more friendly.

How to Delete Embedded Excel Objects in VBA

I wanted to do a bulk delete of embedded chemical structures in a series of Excel workbooks, without touching embedded graphs and data tables. Here's the resulting VBA code. You should be able to easily modify this to delete any custom object types in an Excel workbook.

Sub WipeObjects
' Delete all current embedded chemical structures from currently open Excel workbook
' Example sub to call ChemObjectWipe function
    MsgBox ChemObjectWipe()
End Sub

Function ChemObjectWipe() As String
    Dim currSheet As Worksheet
    Dim itemnum As Long
    For Each currSheet In ActiveWorkbook.Sheets
        Dim structures As New Collection
        Dim embeddedItems As OLEObjects
        Dim shp As OLEObject
        Dim deleteStatus As String
        Dim creator, currName As String
        Set embeddedItems = currSheet.OLEObjects
        If (embeddedItems.Count > 0) Then
        For Each shp In embeddedItems
            currName = ""
            creator = ""
            currName = shp.Name
            creator = UCase(shp.progID)
'            MsgBox currName & creator & " item number "
            deleteStatus = ""
' Return value
            ChemObjectWipe = ChemObjectWipe & currName & "::" & creator
' Change substrings here to match different object creators
            If ((InStr(creator, "ISIS") <> 0) Or (InStr(creator, "CHEM") <> 0) Or (InStr(creator, "MDL") <> 0)) Then
'                MsgBox "Adding to delete queue " & creator & "::" & currName
                ChemObjectWipe = ChemObjectWipe & "(ERASED)"
                structures.Add (currName)
            End If
            ChemObjectWipe = ChemObjectWipe & ";"
        Next shp
'        MsgBox "Count = " & Str(structures.Count)
        For itemnum = 1 To structures.Count
            embeddedItems(structures.Item(itemnum)).Delete
        Next itemnum
        End If
    Next currSheet
End Function