Unix—all releases
Something that has not been made very clear in the Oracle Scheduler documentation is that redirection cannot be used in jobs (<, >, >>, |, &&, ||). Therefore, many developers have tried to use it. So, let's keep in mind that we cannot use redirection, not in 11g as well as older releases of the database.
The scripts must be executable, so don't forget to set the execution bits. This might seem like knocking down an open door, but it's easily forgotten.
The user (who is the process owner of the external job and is nobody:nobody by default) should be able to execute the $ORACLE_HOME/bin/extjob file. In Unix, this means that the user should have execution permissions on all the parent directories of this file. This is not something specific to Oracle; it's just the way a Unix file system works. Really! Check it out. Since 10gR1, Oracle does not give execution privileges to others. A simple test for this is to try starting SQL*Plus as a user who is neither...
