Verbs and Subjects
CL command names are a shorthand form of the standard grammar for an English Language imperative statement. Each command is an instruction to the computer to perform an action. The command consist of a verb, or action, part and a noun, or receiver of the action, followed by the subject that will be acted upon(an object in the grammatical sense, but because object has specialized meaning on the AS400/i-Series, to avoid confusion we use the word subject).
Command names are limited to a maximum length of 10 characters. The verbs are ususally represented by 3 characters. The subject represented by 1 or 3 characters.
A general rule of thumb is that CL abbreviates words to their three most significant consonants. When a CL abbreviation include a vowel, it is usually the first vowel or the only vowel in a word. There are however exception to this rule, example LIB to represent Library.
Adjectives and Subject Phrases
At times, using a simple subject is not sufficient. In these cases, CL also allows you to specify an adjective to be associated with the subject. Example WRKACTJOB(Work with Active Jobs). Specifying the adjective ACT, CL shorthand for the adjective active, effectively limits the scope of the command to working with active jobs only.
In some cases, the names of the command does not fit into the verb/adjective/subject structure. For example, consider the DSPPFM (Display Physical File Member) command. This command combines the verb DSP(display) with a subject phrase containing an adjective, P (Physical), and two subjects, F (File) and M (Member). Other commands, like ADDPFM(Add Physical File Member), CHGPFM (Change Physical File Member), and RGZPFM (Reorganize Physical File Member) use the same subject phrase (PFM). This verb/subject phrase structure complicates selecting the correct name of a CL command, but the structure is not used heavily in CL.
