A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument

question

A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘/s’.

Now ive read online you can remove them and when the pc restarts itll be remade without any bad files which may of been there in the first place. Following a guide I typed this into powershell : rmdir «System Volume Information» /s /q but im getting this back : Remove-Item : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘/s’.
At line:1 char:1
+ rmdir «System Volume Information» /s /q
+

+ CategoryInfo : InvalidArgument: (:) [Remove-Item], ParameterBindingException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : PositionalParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.RemoveItemCommand

Im hoping one of you guys would be so kind to help me finally remove these files so I can try a clean install and be free of this awful virus which seems to infect my windows apps, defender and firewall amongst other things. Please can someone help me?

Thankyou so much

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2 Answers

are you running the command rmdir «System Volume Information» /s /q in a PowerShell or Command Prompt?

In PowerShell you could use this to get the same result:

In Command Prompt the rmdir «System Volume Information» /s /q should work. Or you can try «rd «System Volume Information» /s /q`

If you want to install a clean Windows I would recommend to delete all partitions and create new partitions with formatting during the setup phase. This way you will get rid of all the «old stuff».

(If the reply was helpful please don’t forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Hi
@Knin3-5544
I am eager to help you on this issue, as you said ‘’Remove-Item : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘/s’.’’ Obviously, it shows that this command line lacks positional pararmeter. The usage of this command line should be

RMDIR [/S] [/Q] [drive:]path
RD [/S] [/Q] [drive:]path
For example: rmdir /s/q C:\test // s means delete, q means execute without confirmation

However, this command line might not necessarily solve your issue because those problematic files are set by hackers that don’t allowed to be deleted without access or privilege. Also, we should use this command line with great caution because it will remove all files in the directory quietly.
Seeing that you have reinstalled your PC many time.
You should format the disk to eradicate those viruses and do a clean install afterwards. In this case.
You can connect your current disk to another device to do the format, otherwise you can boot from a Usb disk with win10.iso. format and delete partition C:/ along with MSR, recovery and system.

Hope this can help you
If your need further help, be free reply to me at your convenience.

Powershell: A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument «xxx»

I am trying to understand what this error actually means. So far a search of similar help requests for this error range from missing parameters, missing pipes, use of single or multi-lines, and also concatenation issues but none of the answers seem to give a definitive reason. So I assume the issue is code format (which makes it a lot harder to track down).

This is my script which I am writing to rename active directory users per target OU from whatever format they are now into a firstname.surname format.

I have created a test OU in AD with some users who will trigger errors and some that will not. However, the users that should not give me an error are giving me the «a positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument «firstname.surname»

I cannot see what is wrong with the script but hopefully, someone can give me some pointers.

8 Answers 8

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Cmdlets in powershell accept a bunch of arguments. When these arguments are defined you can define a position for each of them.

However if you specify more arguments than there are positional parameters defined then you will get the error.

As this cmdlet does not know how to accept the second positional parameter you get the error. You can fix this by telling it what the parameter is meant to be.

cd Program Files error: positional parameter cannot be found

This is the error it shows:

5 Answers 5

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As stated in Maximilian Burszley’s helpful answer, Program Files is parsed as two arguments, because spaces are used to separate command-line arguments.

Your attempt to use cd Program Files may be inspired by cmd.exe (the legacy Command Prompt), where this syntax indeed works; however, even there it conceptually violates the usual rules of argument parsing.

Therefore, you need to use a form of quoting in order to pass a value that contains spaces as a single argument.

You have several options to implement this quoting:

Use ‘. ‘ around values that are literals, i.e., that should be used as-is.

Use ` to quote (escape) a single character.

Therefore, you could use any of the following:

Also, you can use tab-completion to expand the (space-less) prefix of a space-containing path to its full form with quoting applied implicitly.

E.g., if you’re in C:\ and you type:

PowerShell automatically completes the command to:

` just escape the space in folder name.

The reason is invalid syntax. Each argument to a powershell command is separated by space, so what you’re actually doing is something similar to:

But Set-Location (aliased: cd ) does not have any positional arguments for a second position, so it can’t bind it to any parameters and use it in the command, hence the terminating error.

A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument

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Question

I’m getting this error that I have been trying to resolve. Need some help please.

PS H:\> C:\Errors-chk_exch4.ps1
A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘ ‘.

At C:\Errors-chk_exch4.ps1:1 char:17

Answers

You seem to be supplying both mandatory parameters, the first one coming from the pipeline.

I assume line 175 is the one referencing Get-WinEvent. Funny how it was originally at line 1 in your initial post.

This means that there is a problem in that particular line. If you look closely, you will see a stray backtick character:

You should either remove the backtick, or insert a newline immediately after it.

Alternately, having the pipe character «|» as the last one on a line effectively continues the statement to the next line. So instead of this sequence: [first line][backtick][newline][pipecharacter][continued line] you could use [first line][pipecharacter][newline][continued line], i.e.:

Yes its 175. Originally it was line 1 since I had not posted the entire script since it was lengthy.

Thanks! Apparently, there were a couple of back tickies and formatting that caused it to error.

Here is the updated section.

# you can add other events to ignore in these

All replies

Grant Ward, a.k.a. Bigteddy

Okay here is the script.

[Parameter(ParameterSetName=’Delimiter’, Position=1)]
[ValidateNotNull()]
[System.Char]
$,

#String variable to become the target command line
$scriptCmdPipeline = »

# Add new parameter handling
#region Dmitry: Process and remove the Append parameter if it is present
if ($Append)
<
$PSBoundParameters.Remove(‘Append’) | Out-Null

# Skip the first line (the one with the property names)
$scriptCmdPipeline += ‘ | Foreach-Object <$start=$true>‘
$scriptCmdPipeline += ‘ else <$_>> ‘

#.ForwardHelpTargetName Export-Csv
#.ForwardHelpCategory Cmdlet
>

try
<
$path = «$scan\Exchange_Errors.csv»

# you can add other events to ignore in these

A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument-System.Management.Automation.PSCredential’-Error

I have a script which needs to run from remote by passing on credentials in the script as as below:-

However I keep on getting error as below:-

2 Answers 2

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If you are on this PSVersion and below, here is your root cause of why this fails on Set-Service.

You have unneeded stuff in the script as well.

I suggest refactoriung to this

The Problem is, that set-service doesn’t have a credential parameter. Look here

Try something like this:

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