The 'ccontrol default' facility has unfortunately fallen somewhat into disuse, possibly because we did not anticipate much customer interest in it after the product evolved from the old single-instance implementations preceding Cache (Open M etc) on Unix and VMS server platforms. The intent of the "default" instance was to provide a bridge between these older versions and first-time users of multi-instance configurations on a given machine under Cache. Many customers still had scripts and procedures that did not employ an instance name, and we wished to make the transition a bit easier. We expected that in time the "default" would be deprecated.

You are right that, for syntactical reasons, the other commands that could be used with a single-instance implementation did not (and still do not) provide a shorthand notation implying the default (or only) instance. We anticipated that if there were customer interest in such a permanent feature, it would be requested.

BTW, I apologize for the lack of detail about this in the current doc set. The documentation has been trimmed down over the years, and no longer contains a full set of ccontrol commands and detailed information about them. The 'ccontrol help' was merely intended to be a reminder of the available operations and what they do, but had not been intended to take the place of our doc set.

If you think that enhancing the "default" instance functionality would be useful -- and I like the suggestion of a "." (dot) or some such to be an abbreviation for it -- then by all means request its implementation. Making your life easier is what it is all about!