IOS Scripting with Tcl

Discovered during Cisco CCNP course, Tcl (originally from “Tool Command Language“) is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout and introduced from IOS version 12.3(2)T. But what is Cisco Tcl? The Cisco IOS Tcl shell was designed to allow customers to run Tcl commands directly from the Cisco IOS CLI prompt. Cisco IOS software does contain some subsystems such as Embedded Syslog Manager (ESM) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) that use Tcl interpreters as part of their implementation. These subsystems have their own proprietary commands and keyword options that are not available in the Tcl shell.