OPatch is reliable and protects Oracle_home and the inventory. It can bring back the contents of the Oracle_home directory to a stable state from patch application failures. It can also easily detect patch conflicts.

OPatch logs information to a .log file. Here is an example entry:

Log file location : /home/oracle_
TEST/product/11.1.0/db1/cfgtoollogs/opatch/opatch-yyyy_month_dd_HH-MM-SS-IST_Wed.log

If you encountered errors while installing a patch and you need assistance from Oracle Technical Support, be sure to provide the associated log file together with the patch command you used to install the patch.