Datapatch hangs on "Gathering database info..."

Hi.

Hit this issue on the one Windows server. The datapatch command freezes completely after displaying “Gathering database info…” prompt like this

D:\oracle\ora193\opatch> datapatch -verbose
SQL Patching tool version 19.12.0.0.0 Production on Tue Aug 31 14:10:50 2021
Copyright (c) 2012, 2021, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Log file for this invocation: D:\oracle\cfgtoollogs\...\sqlpatch_invocation.log

Connecting to database...OK
Gathering database info...

The problem is that the datapatch uses Windows internal type command to create temporary files. It is defined in the %ORACLE_HOME%\rdbms\admin\catcon.pm file in the sub os_dependent_stuff:

my $WindowsDoneCmd = "\nhost type nul > ";

It turns out that on the server there was another type.exe file from UnxUtils in the PATH. So the datapatch has used it instead of command processor’s internal type.

That’s why things went wrong: the datapatch couldn’t create the file and waits forever on the following line (sub exec_DB_script):

select (undef, undef, undef, 0.01) until (-e $DoneFile);

After removing the third-party type.exe from the PATH, the datapatch works fine again.

I have no idea why Oracle decided to use external utilities to create files while sqlplus can create files with its own SPOOL command just fine…

Hope it helps!

UPD:

1. To debug datapatch you can use the -debug switch, but it doesn’t help much. Setting the environment variable “CATCON_DEBUG” to “true” enables debug mode in the catcon.pm and it is much more helpful.

2. You can use where command to find files in the PATH:

    C:\>where type
    c:\Program Files\bin\type.exe
   
    C:\>del "c:\Program Files\bin\type.exe"
   
    C:\>where type
    INFO: Could not find files for the given pattern(s).