When Typography Goes Bad

So I’ve just spent a very confused 15 minutes trying to figure out why something that cannot possibly go wrong was breaking. I’m working to get DynamoDBLocal up and running.

It all looks very simple: download the tar ball, unpack it, and execute the Java invocation:
java –Djava.library.path=. -jar DynamoDBLocal.jar

Hmm. That’s odd:
Error: Could not find or load main class –Djava.library.path=.
Looking at the blog comments, a good number of folk have found the same problem, and come up with suspiciously complex solutions. Let’s see what happens if I re-type the command rather than cutting-and-pasting:
java -Djava.library.path=. -jar DynamoDBLocal.jar

Success:
2013-10-15 10:14:47.024:INFO:oejs.Server:jetty-8.y.z-SNAPSHOT
2013-10-15 10:14:47.220:INFO:oejs.AbstractConnector:Started SelectChannelConnector@0.0.0.0:8000

Can you see it? No? I missed it as well: the ‘-‘ in front of the D is an em-dash, not a minus sign (ie ASCII character 45)