rlwrap and sqlplus
As you know I'm a fan of the CLI in many (but not all) instances, especially ones who are engineered to work well for CLI'ers. I prefer mysql over Oracle and sqlplus over the heavy handed SQL Developer. The SQL Developer weighs in at over 181 Meg and while it has a nice GUI and extensive set of trees and widgets to explore every innard of Oracle's SQL implementation it's slow, slow, slow to load and run and ended up taking > 250 Meg of my memory when running. Suffice it say it was not very workable and definitely overkill for the simple selects and the like that I wanted to do.
Oracle's sqlplus weighs in at 700K or so, is light and quick to load and quick to execute commands. However it has a horrid CLI interface, not history, no re-editing of previous commands, etc. I'm surprised that backspace works honestly. However I could not continue to have SQL Developer bogging down my system and get any meaningful work done. My problems were twofold: 1) how to connect to the database (Oracle makes this so hard) and 2) how to improve on sqlplus' horrid CLI.
We actually have sqlplus at /data/tools/OraInstantClient_10_2 but when I run it it prompts for username and password then complains "ORA-12162: TNS:net service name is incorrectly specified". Trying sqlplus
$ # or
$ /data/tools/OraInstantClient_10_2/sqlplus qcread/******@pdbgen02/pettd1p
However it still has a crummy CLI so it's rlwrap to the rescue! rlwrap is a little program that wraps a CLI with ReadLine giving you most of ReadLine's functionality. So now I have a simple alias of: