Tenable Nessus Manager, Professional, and Expert

As a user with administrator privileges, you can do certain actions in Tenable Nessus Manager, Tenable Nessus Professional, and Tenable Nessus Expert via the command line. You can manage user accounts, modify advanced settings, manage digital certificates, report bugs, update software and plugins, and view license information.

This command is called nessuscli and is available on all supported Tenable Nessus versions.

The majority of the examples show usage for Tenable Nessus Manager and Tenable Nessus Professional. The examples for Tenable Nessus Agents are specified in the Nessus Agents section.

Nessus Command Line Tool

The following table provides instructions for running the Tenable Nessus command line tool nessuscli on all supported platforms. The basic usage for all operating systems is listed in the following table:

Operating System	Command
Windows	C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus\nessuscli.exe <cmd> <arg1> <arg2>
macOS	# /Library/Nessus/run/sbin/nessuscli <cmd> <arg1> <arg2>
Linux	# /opt/nessus/sbin/nessuscli <cmd> <arg1> <arg2>
FreeBSD	# /usr/local/nessus/sbin/nessuscli <cmd> <arg1> <arg2>

Note: If you installed Tenable Nessus in a different location, update your path accordingly.

Command Syntax

• # nessuscli — This documentation sometimes uses the shorthand # nessuscli (instead of the full path to the nessuscli tool for the operating system) to represent general usage across different operating systems. However, for your commands to work, you must include the full path for your operating system, as shown above.

  For each command, the documentation contains a quick reference section with the full command for each operating system. You can copy and paste these commands directly into the command line terminal.

• <cmd> — The command. Do not include the brackets (< >).

• <arg 1> <arg 2> — The arguments for the command, if applicable. Do not include the brackets (< >).