Nessus Manager, Professional, and Expert

As a user with administrator privileges, you can do certain actions in Tenable Nessus Manager, Tenable Nessus Professional, and 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.

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

Nessus Command Line Tool

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

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