RMAN - Logging Command-Line RMAN Output

Problem
You want to log the output of RMAN commands you issue in command-line mode.

Solution
If you want RMAN to log all its output when you use RMAN from the operating system command line, just add the keyword log to the command line, and supply the name of the log file to use. For example:

$ rman target / cmdfile commandfile1.rcv log /u01/app/oracle/outfile.txt

In this case, RMAN will write the output of the RMAN commands in the command file named commandfile.rcv to the log file outfile.txt. If you later want to run another set of RMAN commands and want to append the log messages to the same log file, you can do this by using the append option along with the log option. Here’s an example:

$ rman target / cmdfile commandfile2.rcv log /u01/app/oracle/outfile.txt append

The previous command will append the output from executing the command file commandfile2.rcv to the text file outfile.txt.

How It Works
The command-line argument log causes RMAN to send all its output to the log file you specify.Failure to add the keyword append when referring to an already existing log file will result in the overwriting of that older log file. If you are running RMAN interactively and you want to see output on your terminal screen as well as have it written to a log file, you can take advantage of the Unix/Linux tee command. The tee command sends output both to a text file and to the terminal. Here’s how you use the tee command:

$ rman | tee rman.log
RMAN>

All is not lost if you don’t specify a log file to capture the RMAN output. The view V$RMAN_OUTPUT returns detailed information about RMAN jobs in progress. For example, if your media manager runs into a problem with a tape drive, RMAN records the associated error messages in V$RMAN_OUTPUT and also outputs the message to the terminal or to a log file. As with all dynamic performance views, the contents of the V$RMAN_OUTPUT view are refreshed when you restart the database. The V$RMAN_STATUS view contains information about completed RMAN jobs as well as all RMAN jobs in progress.