The is rarely a sign of deep corruption or a bug in Oracle itself. In over 95% of cases, it is an environmental misconfiguration—an unset ORACLE_HOME , a missing NLS_LANG setting, insufficient file permissions, or a library path issue.
set ORACLE_HOME=C:\app\oracle\product\19.0.0\dbhome_1 set PATH=%ORACLE_HOME%\bin;%PATH% sqlplus /nolog Sqlplus Error 57 Initializing Sql-plus Error Loading Message
If this works, your normal shell profile ( .bashrc , .profile , .cshrc ) contains a conflicting setting (e.g., a corrupt LD_LIBRARY_PATH or a non-printable character in ORACLE_HOME ). The is rarely a sign of deep corruption
strace -e openat sqlplus /nolog 2>&1 | grep -i "sp2\|mesg" strace -e openat sqlplus /nolog 2>&1 | grep
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/u01/app/oracle/product/19.3.0/dbhome_1/sqlplus/mesg/sp2us.msb", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
export ORACLE_HOME=/your/oracle/path export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH Use code with caution. Copied to clipboard Spiceworks Community 2. Check Permissions and Privileges
If any of these steps fail, SQL*Plus cannot display even its own banner or help text, hence the vague "Error loading message." The number 57 often correlates to low-level system errors like "file not found" or "permission denied" at the operating system level.