Patent ID: 8161140

Claim:
A client network device, comprising: a CLI-based application program; and a program execution layer external to the CLI-based application program and configured to provide an interface between the CLI-based application program and a remote network device, the program execution layer being operable to: receive at least one predefined CLI-based command selected by the CLI-based application program, the predefined CLI-based command defined externally to the CLI-based application program; transmit the received at least one predefined CLI-based command to the remote network device to obtain data corresponding to the remote network device; receive a CLI-based response from the remote network device, the CLI-based response comprising the data corresponding to the remote network device; extract a subset of the received data from the CLI-based response based on predetermined instructions; and reconfigure the extracted subset of data into a predetermined format that enables the CLI-based application program to query the reconfigured subset of data to obtain the data corresponding to the remote network device, the predetermined format comprises a map entry for each identifier data and at least one value data corresponding to the identifier data.