Operating System Considerations

The following sections discuss situations in which your course of action may depend on the operating system you are using.

Specifying a Complete Path

If you encounter problems when trying to specify a complete path name, it may be due to an operating system-specific incompatibility caused by special characters in the specification. In many cases, specifying the path name within single quotation marks prevents errors.

Backslash Escape Character

In DDL syntax, you can place a double quotation mark inside a string delimited by double quotation marks by preceding it with the backslash escape character (\), if the escape character is allowed on your operating system. The same rule applies when single quotation marks are required in a string delimited by single quotation marks.

For example, homedir\data"norm\mydata contains a double quotation mark. Preceding the double quotation mark with a backslash indicates that the double quotation mark is to be taken literally:

INFILE 'homedir\data\"norm\mydata'

You can also put the escape character itself into a string by entering it twice.

For example:

"so'\"far"     or  'so\'"far'     is parsed as   so'"far 
"'so\\far'"    or  '\'so\\far\''  is parsed as  'so\far' 
"so\\\\far"    or  'so\\\\far'    is parsed as   so\\far

Note:

A double quotation mark in the initial position cannot be preceded by an escape character. Therefore, you should avoid creating strings with an initial quotation mark.

Nonportable Strings

There are two kinds of character strings in a SQL*Loader control file that are not portable between operating systems: filename and file processing option strings. When you convert to a different operating system, you will probably need to modify these strings. All other strings in a SQL*Loader control file should be portable between operating systems.

Using the Backslash as an Escape Character

If your operating system uses the backslash character to separate directories in a path name, and if the release of the Oracle database running on your operating system implements the backslash escape character for file names and other nonportable strings, then you must specify double backslashes in your path names and use single quotation marks.

Escape Character Is Sometimes Disallowed

The release of the Oracle database running on your operating system may not implement the escape character for nonportable strings. When the escape character is disallowed, a backslash is treated as a normal character, rather than as an escape character (although it is still usable in all other strings). Then path names such as the following can be specified normally:

INFILE 'topdir\mydir\myfile'

Double backslashes are not needed.

Because the backslash is not recognized as an escape character, strings within single quotation marks cannot be embedded inside another string delimited by single quotation marks. This rule also holds for double quotation marks. A string within double quotation marks cannot be embedded inside another string delimited by double quotation marks.