projectdiscovery/subfinder · error

max-results cannot be negative

Error message

max-results cannot be negative

What it means

validateOptions enforces that the per-source results limit (max-results) is not negative. A negative MaxResults is meaningless as a cap, so option parsing fails fast with this error before enumeration starts.

Solutions

1. Pass a non-negative integer for -max-results
2. Omit the flag entirely to use the default limit
3. Validate any computed limit value before passing it to the runner

Example fix

// before
subfinder -d example.com -max-results -5
// after
subfinder -d example.com -max-results 100

if maxResults < 0 {
    return fmt.Errorf("max-results must be >= 0, got %d", maxResults)
}

func validMaxResults(n int) bool { return n >= 0 }

opts, err := runner.ParseOptions()
if err != nil && strings.Contains(err.Error(), "max-results cannot be negative") {
    // fix flag value and retry parse
}

When it happens

Trigger: Supplying -max-results with a negative integer on the CLI, or programmatically setting Options.MaxResults < 0 before ParseOptions runs validation.

Common situations: Shell scripts computing the limit with variables that can go negative; typos like '-5' intended as a flag; copied config files with negative values.

Understand the failure class

Background: "unknown output mode", "invalid value for flag", "expects true/false": fixing invalid flag value errors in CLI tools — this error's family across 24 libraries.

Related errors

• response-size-read cannot be negative
• invalid source specified in -rls flag

AI-assisted analysis of projectdiscovery/subfinder@7a0b91f0fa (2026-09-06). Data as JSON: /api/errors/83a185df88b7b92b. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at pkg/runner/validate.go:45

		return errors.New("both verbose and silent mode specified")
	}

	// Validate threads and options
	if options.Threads == 0 {
		return errors.New("threads cannot be zero")
	}
	if options.Timeout == 0 {
		return errors.New("timeout cannot be zero")
	}

	// Always remove wildcard with hostip
	if options.HostIP && !options.RemoveWildcard {
		return errors.New("hostip flag must be used with RemoveWildcard option")
	}

	// The per-source results limit cannot be negative.
	if options.MaxResults < 0 {
		return fmt.Errorf("max-results cannot be negative")
	}

	// The response body size limit cannot be negative.
	if options.MaxResponseBodySize < 0 {
		return fmt.Errorf("response-size-read cannot be negative")
	}

	if options.Match != nil {
		options.matchRegexes = make([]*regexp.Regexp, len(options.Match))
		var err error
		for i, re := range options.Match {
			if options.matchRegexes[i], err = regexp.Compile(stripRegexString(re)); err != nil {
				return errors.New("invalid value for match regex option")
			}
		}
	}
	if options.Filter != nil {
		options.filterRegexes = make([]*regexp.Regexp, len(options.Filter))

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