TeamcenterKnowledge

community-knowledge

Teamcenter Command-Line Utilities: Community Notes

Scope: what practitioners (not the official PLM00036 Utilities Reference manual) say about using Teamcenter's command-line utilities day to day — how the command environment gets set up, what utilities get mentioned most, and tips for troubleshooting the environment itself.

The "Teamcenter Command Prompt" and how it's bootstrapped

The core idea repeated across sources: a special shell (tc_profilevars.bat on Windows, tc_profilevars.sh on Unix) is what turns an ordinary command prompt into a "Teamcenter Command Prompt" with all the right environment variables loaded. Two variables anchor everything else:

  • TC_ROOT — the Teamcenter installation directory. TC_ROOT\bin (referred to as TC_BIN) is where most of the command-line utilities actually live.
  • TC_DATA — the data model directory. Normally there is exactly one TC_DATA per Teamcenter site, typically co-located with the corporate/enterprise-tier server install.

tc_profilevars itself is described as the file that should be under source control, since it's the single place holding "all environment variables needed for the Teamcenter environment to function properly." Site admins commonly pre-configure workstations so ordinary users never have to set this by hand.

Practical verification tip repeated in the tutorial: after opening a Teamcenter Command Prompt, run

set tc

This dumps every environment variable beginning with TC_/tc so you can immediately confirm the prompt initialized correctly before running any utility — a fast sanity check before assuming a utility failure is a bug rather than a bad environment.

Source: Tutorial: Learn the Teamcenter Command Prompt – tctoolbox.com (mirrored at awtoolbox.com under the same title)

Utilities that come up repeatedly in practitioner write-ups

None of the sources found offer a single canonical "top utilities" list as rich as the official Utilities Reference manual (PLM00036), but the following showed up by name across the blogs/guides gathered:

  • ug_import / ug_export — import/export NX assemblies (master and non-master parts, plus associated files such as manufacturing files or shaded-image files) into/out of the Teamcenter database.
  • preferences_manager — import/export preferences and manage preference definitions from the command line (useful for moving preference sets between environments/promoting through DEV→TEST→PROD).
  • am_install_tree — installs/updates Access Manager (AM) rule trees.
  • am_re_diagnostics — validates read-access expressions and helps troubleshoot ACL/permission problems.
  • cleanup_orphan_arrangements — removes unused/orphaned product-structure arrangement data.
  • prune_named_references — cleans up unused named references (dataset file references) in the database.
  • tcradmin — came up by name in a Siemens community forum thread title ("Using the tcradmin command line function"), but the thread itself sits behind the community login wall and its content could not be retrieved in this pass — flagging existence only, not content.

Sources: cad2plm — Teamcenter Utilities Complete Guide, Teamcenter Integration utilities (mirrored NX help doc)

Where the official reference PDFs still circulate

The full official "Teamcenter Utilities Reference" (publication PLM00036) is the actual exhaustive list of every utility, its flags, and its purpose — several older, unofficially re-hosted copies (8.3 and 10.1 editions) surfaced during this search on third-party mirror sites (download.plmjobmanager.com, Scribd). These are useful as a fallback if the current-version official Siemens documentation isn't on hand, but version-currency is not guaranteed on a mirror — always prefer the version-matched official copy if available in the licensed documentation set.

What was NOT found

  • No practitioner blog post walked through a full worked example of a specific tricky utility (e.g., a step-by-step tcxmlimport/tcxmlexport session with real flags and output) — search turned up only the utilities' existence and general purpose statements, not transcripts of real command-line sessions.
  • No dedicated YouTube walkthrough of the command-line utilities as a set was found; the tctoolbox/awtoolbox blog post is text-only.