affaan-m/ECC · error

Unknown argument

Error message

Unknown argument: ${arg}

What it means

parseArgs walks platform-audit's argv and throws `Unknown argument: <arg>` for any token that does not match a recognized flag. This strict whitelist prevents typos from being silently ignored — e.g. passing --outdir when the tool expects --output would otherwise run the audit with defaults.

Solutions

1. Run the script with --help (or no args) and use only the listed flags.
2. Fix the typo — common ones: --output not --out, --format not --fmt.
3. Quote values containing spaces so they don't split into stray tokens: `--output "my report.md"`.
4. Check the current script source (the parseArgs chain in scripts/platform-audit.js) for the exact accepted flags if docs are outdated.

Example fix

# before (typo silently would be ignored elsewhere; here it throws)
node scripts/platform-audit.js --outpt report.json

# after
node scripts/platform-audit.js --output report.json --format json

const KNOWN = new Set(['--output','--format','--json','--markdown','--exit-code','--write']);
const bad = process.argv.slice(2).filter(a => a.startsWith('--') && !KNOWN.has(a));
if (bad.length) { console.error(`unknown flags: ${bad.join(', ')}`); process.exit(2); }

try {
  const parsed = parseArgs(process.argv);
} catch (err) {
  if (/^Unknown argument/.test(err.message)) {
    console.error(`${err.message}\nRun with no args to see usage.`);
    process.exit(2);
  }
  throw err;
}

When it happens

Trigger: Invoking the script with a misspelled flag (--markdownx, --outpt), a flag from a different tool, an extra positional word ('node scripts/platform-audit.js run --json'), or a stray value quoted as its own token.

Common situations: Muscle memory from other audit tools' flag names; copy-pasting commands between ECC scripts with different flag sets; shell word-splitting inserting extra tokens from unquoted variables; upgrading ECC and using a renamed/removed flag from an old blog post.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Unknown argument", "Invalid value", and "must be one of": invalid CLI argument errors explained — this error's family across 35 libraries.

Related errors

• requires a value
• Invalid
• requires a value.
• does not accept positional arguments.
• --exit-code with --watch requires --watch-count so the…

AI-assisted analysis of affaan-m/ECC@8321021c54 (2026-09-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/4e31f22d11b425d7. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at scripts/platform-audit.js:202

      continue;
    }

    if (arg.startsWith('--max-dirty-files=')) {
      parsed.thresholds.maxDirtyFiles = parseIntegerFlag(arg.slice('--max-dirty-files='.length), '--max-dirty-files');
      continue;
    }

    if (arg === '--use-env-github-token') {
      parsed.useEnvGithubToken = true;
      continue;
    }

    if (arg === '--exit-code') {
      parsed.exitCode = true;
      continue;
    }

    throw new Error(`Unknown argument: ${arg}`);
  }

  if (!['text', 'json', 'markdown'].includes(parsed.format)) {
    throw new Error(`Invalid format: ${parsed.format}. Use text, json, or markdown.`);
  }

  if (parsed.writePath && parsed.format === 'text') {
    throw new Error('--write requires --json, --markdown, or --format json|markdown');
  }

  parsed.allowUntracked = parsed.allowUntracked.map(normalizeRelativePrefix);

  return parsed;
}

function normalizeRelativePrefix(value) {
  return String(value || '')
    .replace(/\\/g, '/')

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