Formatting rules

Follow these rules for formatting various types of input arguments:

• Dates
• NSH style paths
• Fully qualified paths
• Double quotes

Dates

Use the following format for entering dates:

yyyy-MM-DD HH:mm:ss

Examples

In addition to the syntax described above, some commands require that you also specify the time zone, using the following format:

yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ssZ

where Z indicates the UTC timezone.

For example, to specify December 15, 2009, 3:14 PM in USA Mountain Time, you would specify the following:

To indicate this time for France, you would specify the following:

NSH style paths

Many BLCLI commands require that you specify an NSH style path to indicate a file or directory on a computer. NSH refers to Network Shell, which uses the following formatting:

(UNIX example) //filestore1/rpms/custom-db-1.1.0.rpm
(Microsoft Windows example) //eng1/c/temp/beaInstall.exe

Some commands do not require the //hostname component.

Fully qualified paths

Many arguments in the CLI ask you to provide fully qualified paths to groups, servers, and server objects. A fully qualified path is a path to the group or object beginning with a slash, such as /ParentGroup/ChildGroup/Object.

When you are specifying groups, the top level group (that is, the root group) is "/".

Examples

• The fully qualified path for the group Test_Location would be the following:
  /Alan/Test_Location
   You do not include the Depot node.
• When you specify a class path, use the SystemObject string. For example, the fully qualified path to the Server property class, (located in the property dictionary), would be the following:
  Class://SystemObject/Server

Double quotes

The way the BLCLI reads the command line is to treat double quotes " " as a means to encapsulate strings. If you need something to be quoted within a string, you must escape that quotation so it is not used as part of the command line being processed for the BLCLI command.

This is true for any command that allows quoted strings to be the value of something (for example, property string values). The most typical place to encounter this situation is in the DepotSoftware namespace (install/uninstall commands).

Examples

Suppose you want to set the uninstallCommand argument to:

In this case, you must include the double quotes around the executable name. To do this, you must escape these double quotes as follows: