Console utility openocd_cmd

The PyOpenocdClient package includes a console utility called openocd_cmd.

This console program can be used to send Tcl commands to OpenOCD from command-line, shell scripts or other non-Python programs.

Synopsis

usage: openocd_cmd [-h] [--host HOST] [--port PORT] [--timeout TIMEOUT] command

Command-line utility that sends a single Tcl command to OpenOCD
through its Tcl-RPC interface.

positional arguments:
  command            The Tcl command to send to OpenOCD

options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --host HOST        Hostname or address of the machine where OpenOCD is running (default: 127.0.0.1)
  --port PORT        OpenOCD's Tcl-RPC server port number (default: 6666)
  --timeout TIMEOUT  Timeout for the command execution in seconds (default: 5.0)

Examples of use

$ openocd_cmd --host 127.0.0.1 --port 6666 version
Open On-Chip Debugger 0.12.0+dev-02634-g390b9d731 (2026-08-29-14:15)

$ openocd_cmd --host 127.0.0.1 --port 6666 "reset halt ; reg pc"
pc (/32): 0x08001234

Exit code of openocd_cmd

If the Tcl command is executed successfully, the openocd_cmd utility exits with code 0.

If an error occurs, the utility exits with a non-zero code, as shown in the table below.

Situation

Exit code of openocd_cmd

Tcl command was executed and succeeded.

0

Tcl command was executed and failed.

Non-zero exit code, equal to the Tcl command return code.

Connection failure

91

Invalid response from OpenOCD

92

Command timeout

93

Output of openocd_cmd

All textual output of the Tcl command is written to stdout.

Any error messages coming from the openocd_cmd tool itself are written to stderr. This keeps them separate from the command output.

Alternative invocation

The openocd_cmd utility can be invoked also via python3 -m py_openocd_client.cli command, which serves as an alias.

The following two commands are therefore equivalent:

$ openocd_cmd --host 127.0.0.1 --port 6666 "reset halt"

$ python3 -m py_openocd_client.cli --host 127.0.0.1 --port 6666 "reset halt"