Tips and tricks
Basic features and characteristics of the CLI environment provide support and ease of use for many CLI tasks.
Help
To display brief help during command entry, press the question mark (?) key.
Press the question mark (?) key at the command prompt to display a list of the commands available and a description of each command.
Type a word or part of a word, then press the question mark (?) key to display a list of valid word completions or subsequent words, and to display a description of each.
Shortcuts and key commands
Command abbreviation
In most cases, you can abbreviate words in the command line to their smallest number of non-ambiguous characters. For example, the command get system status could be abbreviated to g sy st.
Some commands may not be abbreviated. See the notes in the specific commands.
Environment variables
The CLI supports the following environment variables. Variable names are case-sensitive.
|
$USERFROM |
The management access type ( |
|
$USERNAME |
The account name of the administrator that configured the item. |
|
$SerialNum |
The serial number of the FortiMail unit. |
For example, the FortiMail unit’s host name can be set to its serial number.
config system global
set hostname $SerialNum
end
As another example, you could log in as admin1, then configure a restricted secondary administrator account for yourself named admin2, whose first-name is admin1 to indicate that it is another of your accounts:
config system admin
edit admin2
set first-name $USERNAME
Special characters
The characters <, >, (,), #, ', and “ are not permitted in most CLI fields. These characters are special characters, sometimes also called reserved characters.
You may be able to enter a special character as part of a string’s value by using a special command, enclosing it in quotes, or preceding it with an escape sequence — in this case, a backslash ( \ ) character.
|
Character |
Keys |
|---|---|
|
? |
Ctrl + V then ? |
|
Tab |
Ctrl + V then Tab |
|
Space (to be interpreted as part of a string value, not to end the string) |
Enclose the string in quotation marks: Enclose the string in single quotes: Precede the space with a backslash: |
|
' (to be interpreted as part of a string value, not to end the string)
|
\' |
|
" (to be interpreted as part of a string value, not to end the string) |
\" |
|
\ |
\\ |
Language support
Characters such as ñ, é, symbols, and ideographs are sometimes acceptable input. Support varies by the nature of the item being configured.
For example, the host name must not contain special characters, and so the GUI and CLI will not accept most symbols and non-ASCII encoded characters as input when configuring the host name. This means that languages other than English often are not supported. However, some configuration items, such as names and comments, may be able to use the language of your choice. But dictionary profiles support terms encoded in UTF-8, and therefore support a number of languages.
In addition, names of items in the configuration entered using non-ASCII encodings may not display correctly in event log messages.
It is simplest to use only US-ASCII characters when configuring the FortiMail unit using the GUI or CLI. Using only ASCII, you do not need to worry about:
- mail transfer agent (MTA) encoding support
- mail user agent (MUA) language support
- web browser language support
- Telnet and/or SSH client support
- font availability
- compatibility of your input’s encoding with the encoding/language setting of the GUI
- switching input methods when entering a command word such as
getin ASCII but a setting that uses a different encoding
Screen paging
You can configure the CLI to, when displaying multiple pages’ worth of output, pause after displaying each page’s worth of text. When the display pauses, the last line displays ‑‑More‑‑. You can then either:
- Press the spacebar to display the next page.
- Type
Qto truncate the output and return to the command prompt.
This may be useful when displaying lengthy output, such as the list of possible matching commands for command completion, or a long list of settings. Rather than scrolling through or possibly exceeding the buffer of your terminal emulator, you can simply display one page at a time.
To configure the CLI display to pause when the screen is full:
config system console
set output more
end
Baud rate
You can change the default baud rate of the local console connection. For more information, see the FortiMail Administration Guide.
Editing the configuration file on an external host
You can edit the FortiMail configuration on an external host by first backing up the configuration file to a TFTP server. Then edit the configuration file and restore it to the FortiMail unit.
Editing the configuration on an external host can be time-saving if you have many changes to make, especially if your plain text editor provides advanced features such as batch changes.
To edit the configuration on your computer:
- Use backup to download the configuration file to a TFTP server, such as your management computer.
-
Edit the configuration file using a plain text editor that supports Unix-style (
LFonly, notCR LF)line endings.
Do not edit the first line. The first line(s) of the configuration file (preceded by a
#character) contains information about the firmware version and FortiMail model. If you change the model number, the FortiMail unit will reject the configuration file when you attempt to restore it. -
Use restore config to upload the modified configuration file back to the FortiMail unit.
The FortiMail unit downloads the configuration file and checks that the model information is correct. If it is, the FortiMail unit loads the configuration file and checks each command for errors. If a command is invalid, the FortiMail unit ignores the command. If the configuration file is valid, the FortiMail unit restarts and loads the new configuration.
Retrieve command default value
You can use the get default-value command to retrieve the default value of any command table and its objects, from anywhere in the CLI console. This can be especially useful since default values may vary depending upon other prerequisite commands, which FortiMail firmware version you are running, or which FortiMail model you have.
This feature also helps administrators avoid using the unset command in order to see what the default value of any given field may be.
For example, enter the following to retrieve the default values under config system admin:
get default-value system admin
System Time: 2023-08-17 09:07:28 PDT (Uptime: 1d 2h 5m)
access : cli gui rest
access-profile :
auth-strategy : local
language :
level : system
password : *
ssh-certificate :
sshkey :
status : enable
theme : Green
trusted-hosts : 0.0.0.0/0 ::/0
webmode : simple
wildcard : disable