It does look like you are doing everything correct! But I am sure there is an easy (if cryptic) solution. A couple ideas come to mind:
Perhaps you are using an old version of QIIME 2? Please confirm what version you are running.
If you are copying/pasting commands from the internet or (worse yet!) from MS Word or similar formatted document, special characters have a tendency to creep in… try this and let me know if you still get the error:
Type out the full command from scratch directly into your terminal (tab complete will help speed up this process).
If you like to put together a document of commands to run, use “notepad” or “texteditor” or a similar plain text editor for compiling this list, rather than Word or another word processor.
Let me know if that fixes the problem — if not we can work on a more technical solution.
Thanks for your help. I am running version 2019.1 on Virtual Box (version 6.0.4).
I had typed it out in the terminal directly, but I shut down my virtual machine and tried again from scratch as suggested. No luck!
I have actually encountered this problem a few times during my analysis and got around it before by using --o-output-path and, after it requested it, specifying an input path as well. But that was for different steps. I tried using --o-output-path again here but it didn’t work. (Didn’t request an input path, just gave me the “Error: no such option: --o-output-path”).
Thank you both!