The Oracle OCI libraries muck around with SIGCHILD which will affect running child processes (which you are when you run sqlplus like that). If you absolutely need to do what you are doing I think you need to reset SIGCHILD back to its default behavior.

Update: I believe you can stop the oracle libraries doing this by adding BEQUEATH_DETACH=YES to your sqlnet.ora file but I'm not sure of the other affects.

In reply to Re: Host command fails if there is a database connection by mje
in thread Host command fails if there is a database connection by astroboy

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