I get invalid argument error when running bitcoin-cli -getnetworkinfo, and a few other parameters

Question

So I have bitcoind -daemon running and it appears to be generating the blockchain. keeps saying

Potential stale tip detected, will try using extra outbound peer...

The issue is I run bitcoin-cli commands and get the following error:

$ bitcoin-cli -getnetworkinfo
Error parsing command line arguments: Invalid parameter -getnetworkinfo

same for many others. The only cli command that seems to work is :

bitcoin-cli -getinfo
{
  "version": 180100,
  "protocolversion": 70015,
  "walletversion": 169900,
  "balance": 0.00000000,
  "blocks": 0,
  "timeoffset": 0,
  "connections": 0,
  "proxy": "",
  "difficulty": 1,
  "testnet": false,
  "keypoololdest": 1573696666,
  "keypoolsize": 1000,
  "paytxfee": 0.00000000,
  "relayfee": 0.00001000,
  "warnings": ""
}

according to the manual they should all work but many are saying invalid argument. I have searched and am shocked that there does not appear to be any info on why this is happening to some and not others. So here I am.

Answer 1

getinfo has been deprecated as an RPC command, and the hyphenated version is provided as a bridge for legacy applications that have not yet moved to getblockchaininfo and getnetworkinfo.

For regular RPC commands, you do not need the hyphen, and can simply run them as bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo.

The hyphenated parameters control the behaviour of bitcoin-cli itself, such as which datadir to connect to, or whether to use named parameters in the requests.