The CLI is designed to imitate the capabilities of the BUI, while also providing a powerful scripting environment for performing repetitive tasks. The command line is an efficient and powerful tool for repetitive administrative tasks. The appliance presents a CLI available through either the Console or SSH. There are several situations in which the preferred interaction with the system is the CLI:
Network unavailability - If the network is unavailable, browser-based management is impossible; the only vector for management is the Console, which can only accommodate a text-based interface
Expediency - Starting a browser may be prohibitively time-consuming, especially if you only want to examine a particular aspect of the system or make a quick configuration change
Precision - In some situations, the information provided by the browser may be more qualitative than quantitative in nature, and you need a more precise answer
Automation - Browser-based interaction cannot be easily automated; if you have repetitive or rigidly defined tasks, script the tasks
Accessibility - The CLI is an alternative, and equivalent, way to access the BUI features and functionality. Because the operating systems that run on Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance systems support assistive technologies to read the content of the screen, you can use the CLI as an equivalent means to access the color-based, mouse-based, and other visual-based utilities that are part of the BUI. For example, you can use a keyboard to enter CLI commands to identify faulted hardware components, check system status, and monitor system health.
Oracle strives to make its products, services, and supporting documentation usable and accessible to the disabled community. To that end, products, services, and documentation include features that make the product accessible to users of assistive technology. For more information about Oracle's commitment to accessibility, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program website (http://www.oracle.com/pls/topic/lookup?ctx=acc&id=docacc).
When navigating through the CLI, there are two principles to be aware of:
Tab completion is used extensively - if you are not sure what to type in any given context, pressing the Tab key will provide you with possible options. Throughout the documentation, pressing Tab is presented as the word "tab" in bold italics.
Help is always available - the help command provides context-specific help. Help on a particular topic is available by specifying the topic as an argument to help, for example help commands. Available topics are displayed by tab-completing the help command, or by typing help topics.
You can combine these two principles as follows:
dory:> help tab builtins commands general help properties script
To log in remotely using the CLI, use an ssh client. If you have not followed the instructions in Configuring Users to administer the appliance, you will need to log in as root. When you log in, the CLI will present you with a prompt that consists of the hostname, followed by a colon, followed by a greater-than sign:
% ssh root@dory Password: Last login: Mon Oct 13 15:43:05 2009 from kiowa.sf.fishpo dory:>
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