I have an Oracle 8.1.6 database running on HP-UX 11.0 and every evening before I begin the backup, I shutdown Oracle. After the backup, I start it back up. My problem is that I have several external applications that use ODBC connections to the Oracle database, and several users now running terminal services from their homes connecting to the database. The problem is that if even one process still shows active in Oracle, dbshut hangs until that process is killed. If that process is not killed prior to the scheduled startup time, the startup also fails. Is there an easy way to check for and kill open processes prior to executing dbshut?