Following instructions from https://github.com/opendaylight/netconf/tree/master/netconf/tools/netconf-cli to run netconf-cli resulted in error:

java -jar target/netconf-cli-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT-executable.jar
Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.SecurityException: Invalid signature file digest for Manifest main attributes
at sun.security.util.SignatureFileVerifier.processImpl(SignatureFileVerifier.java:314)
at sun.security.util.SignatureFileVerifier.process(SignatureFileVerifier.java:268)
at java.util.jar.JarVerifier.processEntry(JarVerifier.java:316)
at java.util.jar.JarVerifier.update(JarVerifier.java:228)
at java.util.jar.JarFile.initializeVerifier(JarFile.java:383)

This seems like some of dependency (probably xtext) is signed and it's signature is attached into uber JAR. This is then treated as invalid signature by JAR verifier.

As a workaround I tried to remove signature information from META-INF:

zip -d target/netconf-cli-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT-executable.jar META-INF/ECLIPSE_.SF
zip -d target/netconf-cli-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT-executable.jar META-INF/ECLIPSE_.RSA

Now, it yields another error:
java -jar target/netconf-cli-1.2.0-SNAPSHOT-executable.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/slf4j/LoggerFactory
at org.opendaylight.netconf.cli.io.ConsoleIOImpl.<clinit>(ConsoleIOImpl.java:32)
at org.opendaylight.netconf.cli.Main.main(Main.java:48)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.slf4j.LoggerFactory
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:381)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:331)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
... 2 more

Is this tool broken or instructions I followed are incorrect?

tested on latest master branch.