uniread
16 December 2003 02:00

Found a cool little utility today called uniread. It "adds full readline support (command editing, history, etc.) to any existing interactive command-line program. Common examples are Oracle's sqlplus or jython. uniread will work on any POSIX platform with Perl."

Users coming to sqlplus from something like MySQL's CLI may complain about SQL*Plus's apparent clunkiness. From what I have found, though, SQL*Plus is very powerful if you know how to use it. But I will agree, the lack of a command history, and command-editing (aka readline support), is painful. uniread addresses this beautifully. It gives me exactly what I'm used to with SQL*Plus, but augments that with readline support. I'm in heaven. Sure, there's no tab-completion, but that's secondary, in my opinion.