All NCL commands are made up of the same components:  keywords,
    values, and punctuation. Keywords and punctuation are the
    parts of the NCL syntax that remain the same for every network;
    values are the parts that change depending on the particular
    configuration of a network. Values include entity instance
    identifiers and attribute/argument values. In general, you cannot
    abbreviate values, but you can abbreviate keywords as long as the
    abbreviation is unique. A misspeling may cause NCL to treat an
    entity name as if it were an attribute name. However, if spelled
    correctly, it recognizes multiword keywords. For example:

    ncl> show node finance routing circuit *

    can be abbreviated to:

    ncl> sh n finance r c *

    Where finance identifies which node is being used, therefore it
    cannot be abbreviated.

    Values cannot be abbreviated. For example, the following two
    commands are not equivalent:

    ncl> show node finance name
    ncl> show node f name

    The latter command tries to communicate with node f, not node
    finance.

    Notice that, the following command line is ambiguous:

    ncl> s n finance r c * probe rate

    The command is ambiguous because the abbreviation s could stand
    for either the set or show command.

    However, if the value itself consists of keywords, then it can
    be abbreviated. For example, the data type EntityClass, by
    definition, contains keywords representing the various entity
    class names. These keywords can be abbreviated in the same way
    as normal keywords, as long as the abbreviations are unique
    (unambiguous).  See Appendix B of the DECnet-Plus Network Control
    Language Reference for more information on data types
    and keywords.

    As another example, note that the following two commands are
    equivalent. Both pass all events received by the event dispatcher
    from the routing entity.

    ncl> pass ev d out s local_stream gl f ((r), all)
    ncl> pass event dispatcher outbound stream local_stream -
    _ncl> global filter (( routing ), all)

    On Tru64 UNIX, the period character (".") can be used as an
    abbreviation meaning "the entity specified in the previous
    command."  For example:

     ncl> create routing circuit circuit-1
     ncl> enable .