CISCO IOS in a Nutshell

The line Command

The line command specifies which line or group of lines you want to configure by entering the line configuration mode. It doesn’t actually do the configuration; it is followed by other commands that set up the specific properties you want. Here’s the syntax of the line command:

line [aux | console | tty | vty] starting-line-number ending-line-number

The possible line types are aux, console, tty, and vty. These line types are discussed individually in this chapter. The following example shows how to use the line command to configure some properties of the router’s console interface:

Router>enable                              
            Enter the privileged command mode
Router#config terminal                     
            Enter configuration mode
Router(config)#line console 0              
            Select the console line
Router(config-line)#exec-timeout 30 0      
            Set the timeout to 30 minutes
Router(config-line)#exit                   
            Exit the line configuration mode
Router(config)#exit                        
            Exit the configuration mode
Router#

If you want to apply line commands to more than one line, you can specify the starting and ending numbers of a group of lines. For example, say you want to apply the command exec-timeout to TTY lines 5 through 10. Instead of typing this command five times, you can configure the entire group with one line command:

Router(config)#line tty 5 10
Router(config-line)#exec-timeout 30 0

Absolute and Relative Line Numbering

When you’re typing the line command, you give it “relative” line numbers: the first TTY is tty0,^[2] the first virtual terminal is vty0, and so on. ...