dbfsize - did you know about it?

...I didn't till the time I bumped into it today while trying to solve a ORA-27047 issue. I got this error when I was trying to restore a database received from a client for a project; What I had was cold backup + controlfile trace.

CREATE CONTROLFILE SET DATABASE "ND01" RESETLOGS NOARCHIVELOG
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed
ORA-01565: error in identifying file
'/oracle/oradata/ND01/ND01_tools_01.dbf'
ORA-27047: unable to read the header block of file
Additional information: 2

Bumped into dbfsize command while doing some research. Once can use dbv utility (dbverify) but it does not report datafile OS block header corruption thats when you can use dbfsize. It's available in UNIX only. Here is an example of how to use and what it reports :-

$dbfsize ND01_tools_01.dbf
ND01_tools_01.dbf: Header block magic number is bad

Whereas, the dbv would show the following output :-

DBVERIFY - Verification complete

Total Pages Examined : 25600
Total Pages Processed (Data) : 0
Total Pages Failing (Data) : 0
Total Pages Processed (Index): 0
Total Pages Failing (Index): 0
Total Pages Processed (Other): 0
Total Pages Processed (Seg) : 0
Total Pages Failing (Seg) : 0
Total Pages Empty : 0
Total Pages Marked Corrupt : 25600
Total Pages Influx : 0
Highest block SCN : 0 (0.0)

Learning never stops...