What does “too many positional options” mean when doing a mongoexport?

Question

mongoexport -h db.mysite.com -u myUser -p myPass -c myCollection

But the response I get is:

ERROR: too many positional options

Answer 1

I had the same issue with mongodump. After searching a bit, I found out that using the --out parameter to specify the output directory would solve this issue. The syntax for using the out parameter is

mongoexport --collection collection --out collection.json

Also in case your Mongodb instance isn't running, then you could use the --dbpath to specify the exact path to the files of your instance.

Source: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/import-export/