using blastn to search [error] so I'm fairly new to using linux and blast - have encountered an error in my work. 

I have created a fasta database with the results in this directory path: 
~/class/hw/db

I'm currently trying to run a search against my created database against query sequences in a file called seqs.fas. 

My code is as follows: 
blastn -db $db -query seqs.fas -out q1results.txt

However I keep getting this error: 
Error: Too many positional arguments (1), the offending value: seqs.fas

Error:  (CArgException::eSynopsis) Too many positional arguments (1), the offending value: seqs.fas

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here, and would appreciate any advice to fix this, thanks!
I remember having this problem in the past, it was encoding related. Rewriting the -s manually (the dash sign) should fix the issue, please see this.


  Problem is a copy &amp; past from the BLAST documentation, all dashes
  ('–') need to be replaced by hand at the command line.