This International Standard lays out the general framework for the Server Management Command Line Protocol (SM CLP). This standard is intended to guide developers of implementations of the SM CLP and may also be used as a reference by system administrators and other users of SM CLP implementations. The following subjects are within the scope of this document: • command line protocol syntax and semantics; • input format and output format; • accessing and traversing the target address space; • error handling and semantics; • session management, including mapping to supported transports; • session characteristics; • operation processing and reporting. The following subjects are outside the scope of this document: • control command verbs, such as loop control, conditionals, or prompting; • regular expressions, such as mathematical or logical expressions; • command editor environment; • client's shell environment; • physical interconnects; • complex data, data types, or objects; • operation error precedence.