Allied Telesis Comprehensive Guide to Switch Commands with CLI Help

Getting Started with the Command Line Interface (CLI) 19

Aliases

The command line interface supports aliases. An alias is a short name for an often-used longer character sequence. When the user presses [Enter] to execute the command line, the command processor first checks the command line for aliases and substitutes the replacement text. The command line is then parsed and processed normally. Alias substitution is not recursive—the command line is scanned only once for aliases.

Aliases are created and destroyed using the commands:

ADD ALIAS=name STRING=substitution

DELETE ALIAS=name

Getting Command Line Help

Online help is available for all switch commands. A multilingual, language- independent online help facility provides help information via the command:

HELP [topic]

If a topic is not specified, a list of available topics is displayed. The HELP command displays information from the system help file stored in FLASH memory. The help file uses a simple mark-up language to identify topics, access level (USER or MANAGER) and help text. Both standard ASCII and Unicode character encodings are supported. Alternate help files can be uploaded and stored in FLASH, then activated using the command:

SET HELP=helpfile

To display the current help file, enter the command:

SHOW SYSTEM

The help file is easily modified, for example to provide detailed site-specific support information. The mark-up language specification and preprocessor program are available from your authorised distributor or reseller.

Also, typing a question mark “?” at the end of a partially completed command displays a list of the parameters that may follow the current command line, with the minimum abbreviations in uppercase letters (see Figure 1). The current command line is then re-displayed, ready for further input.

Figure 1: Using the question mark character (“?”) to display help for the current command.

Manager > ADD ?

Options : ACC APPletalk BGP CLASSifier BOOTp BRIDge DECnet FRamerelay GRE IP IPX ISDN LAPD LOG MIOX NTP OSPF PERM PPP RADius SA SCript SNmp STReam STT TRIGger

TACacs USEr X25C X25T TDM

Manager > ADD ACC ?

Options : CALL SCript DOmainname

Manager > ADD ACC CALL ?

Options : DIrection DScript CScript RScript POrt ENcapsulation AUthentication DOmainname

Software Release 2.6.1 C613-02039-00 REV A