Connected to an idle instance..DB is up and running

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ ps -ef | grep pmon
oracle    6098     1  0 Jul18 ?        00:00:08 asm_pmon_+ASM1
oracle    8280     1  0 Jul23 ?        00:00:01 ora_pmon_sendb1
oracle   28280 27300  0 18:12 pts/1    00:00:00 grep pmon

[oracle@coltdb01 ~]$ export ORACLE_HOME=/u03/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/

[oracle@coltdb01 ~]$ export ORACLE_SID=sendb1

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ pwd

/u03/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/bin

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ ./sqlplus

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Tue Jul 24 18:13:48 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Enter user-name: / as sysdba

Connected to an idle instance.

I was wondering why I was not able to connect to the instance, which is up and running. After some time I could figure out that, the issue was with the backslash(/) in Oracle Home environment variable. After I removed the backslash(/) I am able to connect to the instance

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ export ORACLE_HOME=/u03/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ export ORACLE_SID=sendb1

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ pwd

/u03/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/bin

[oracle@coltdb01 bin]$ ./sqlplus

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Tue Jul 24 18:17:09 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Enter user-name: / as sysdba

Connected to:

Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production

With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP,

Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL>