CLI quick start

opentele-ng ships a small CLI for the common one-shot workflows. After pip install opentele-ng, the opentele-ng command is on your PATH.

Inspect a tdata folder (read-only)

opentele-ng info /path/to/Telegram/tdata

tdata: /path/to/Telegram/tdata
  AppVersion:       6008002
  accounts:         2
  main account idx: 0
  └─ [0] UserId=6925730240 DC=4 authKey_sha256=775161c1b987143b…
  └─ [1] UserId=8001234567 DC=5 authKey_sha256=eac0a1a2cc10a5ce…

Add --json to get a machine-readable dump (suitable for piping into jq or saving alongside other metadata):

opentele-ng info /path/to/Telegram/tdata --json | jq '.accounts[].UserId'

Convert tdata → Telethon .session file

opentele-ng convert /path/to/Telegram/tdata --output ./me.session

By default this creates a new Telegram session (Telegram Desktop's existing session keeps working separately). Pass --use-current-session to reuse the live session instead:

opentele-ng convert /path/to/Telegram/tdata \
    --output ./me.session \
    --use-current-session

Add --force to overwrite an existing output file.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success.
2	The tdata path is not a directory / does not exist.
3	TDesktop failed to load (corrupt tdata, wrong path).
4	Telethon did not produce the .session file.
5	Output file exists; rerun with --force.
130	Interrupted (Ctrl-C).

Scripting

The CLI is the right tool when you don't need to customise anything. As soon as you want to set a custom API ID, pass extra Telethon options, or do batch operations, switch to the Python API — see convert-tdata-to-telethon.md.