I have been facing this issue with sqlplus for quite sometime and have been ignoring it with shortage of time as an excuse. But i couldn’t avoid any further given that i had to do lot of DB stuff recently and i needed it running fine.

Issue:

I have TOAD, SQL Developer and SQLPlus all installed. I was able to connect to my db using TOAD and SQL Developer without issues but whenever i tried connecting using SQLPlus with same db/schema/pwd it threw up following error message,

ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified

Strange!!!. There aint any issue with tnsnames.ora or sqlnet.ora since it is being used by other tools and they work fine. I googled around and did checks here n there but no help.

Resolution:

I happened to read somewhere that some special characters like @ etc. have special meaning for sqlplus and using them in userid/password confuses it. I had an @ in my password and that was the reason for this error. I changed my pwd and it worked like charm.