When basic operations fail

I wonder how often this happens to other people?

You use a certain command every other day, then forget it for a while and then - when using it again those commands play dirty tricks on you. Kind of a revenge for a lack of TLC?

Happened to me today. I was playing with my VMWare machines and was tired of starting all Oracle components by hand. Of course the only viable solution is a script.

So writing one was done in about a minute.

Here it is:

export ORAENV_ASK=no
export ORACLE_SID=soadb
. oraenv
lsnrctl start
sqlplus <<>
connect / as sysdba
startup
EOF
emctl start dbconsole
export ORACLE_SID=soasuite
. oraenv
opmnctl startall


Starting my script and turning away to read some other blogs I returned after five minutes hoping that everything was up and running.
No. My script waited with

ORACLE_SID = [soadb] ?


Took me another five minutes to find the solution.
Apparently ORAENV_ASK will work perfectly with a capital NO but not with a lowercase no.

So I invite you all to tell me how stupid I was and how often these little annoying things happen to you.