Try to specify the name of your cli tool in the bin property, like:

"bin": {
  "mycli": "./bin/mycli" // or "/bin/mycli.js" if it's a .js file
}

Then, run npm link, from inside your project folder, to create a global symbolic link to the current folder.

Don't forget to add the "preferGlobal": "true" property just before the bin property in your package.json file, in order to warn users to install your module globally.

Whenever I was trying to get my app to link, I kept running into problems on Windows where the generated scripts that would execute on path would try to run the *.js file using the default Windows executable (I don't know what that would be). I'm not sure why. I think it might be because it is a JavaScript file. However, I compared the generated scripts to some of the other modules I had installed, and figured out that if I made the bin file referenced by the package.json act as though it were to be executed on a *nix machine, npm would automatically try and add the call to node.

For example:

If my package.json looks like this:

myapp/package.json

"name": "myapp",
"bin": {
    "myapp": "./bin/myapp"
}

My referenced bin file looks like this:

myapp/bin/myapp

#!/usr/bin/env node
require("../server.js");

The 2 generated executable files that appear in %APPDATA%\npm show up as follows by running the command npm link from within the myapp directory (which would have package.json in the root):

myapp

#!/bin/sh
basedir=`dirname "$0"`

case `uname` in
    *CYGWIN*) basedir=`cygpath -w "$basedir"`;;
esac

if [ -x "$basedir/node" ]; then
  "$basedir/node"  "$basedir/node_modules/myapp/bin/myapp" "$@"
  ret=$?
else 
  node  "$basedir/node_modules/myapp/bin/myapp" "$@"
  ret=$?
fi
exit $ret

myapp.cmd

@IF EXIST "%~dp0\node.exe" (
  "%~dp0\node.exe"  "%~dp0\node_modules\myapp\bin\myapp" %*
) ELSE (
  node  "%~dp0\node_modules\myapp\bin\myapp" %*
)

Bear in mind, I didn't need to make the 2 files above explicitly, I just needed to have the file to be executed as the bin file in the package.json. npm did the file creation.