Patent ID: 7444320

Claim:
A system comprising: a first high-availability device that receives configuration data from at least one other high-availability device, the first high-availability device and the at least one other high-availability device capable of communicating with a plurality of network devices, each of said network devices having device identifiers; a configuration module for the first high-availability device that configures the first high-availability device to communicate with at least a subset of the plurality of network devices; a database that stores device identification data representing the device identifiers, the database having one or more columns, the one or more columns having column names; and a command interpreter for the configuration module that displays at least a subset of the device identification data in response to detecting a completion token in a command line input stream, wherein the device identification data is displayed prior to the completion of the command line input stream and further wherein the command interpreter detects a substitution token; and replace a command line parameter with data from the database identified by the substitution token, the command line parameter selected from the column having a column name matching a text string appearing immediately before the substitution token on the command line input stream.