When running the clustering lab at JBW hosted by Rich Rapoosa, I mistakeningly typed in the wrong command line parameters. We were supposed to use dots and with tired eyes I misread the screen and used dashes. The error message that came up made very little sense. It would be great to stop the server booting with any unused/injected parameter that was passed in at the command line. My example command was this, but it should work for any unused passed in parameter. ./domain.sh --host-config=host-slave.xml -Djboss.domain.base.dir=/home/jimtyrrell/Servers/machine3/ -Djboss.domain-master-address=127.0.0.1

The error message was this:

[Host Controller] 09:48:27,318 ERROR [org.jboss.as.controller.management-operation] (Controller Boot Thread) JBAS014613: Operation ("write-remote-domain-controller") failed - address: ([("host" => "hostjim2")]) - failure description: "JBAS014802: Cannot resolve expression 'expression \"${jboss.domain.master.address}\"' – java.lang.IllegalStateException: Failed to resolve expression: ${jboss.domain.master.address}"
[Host Controller] 09:48:27,320 FATAL [org.jboss.as.host.controller] (Controller Boot Thread) JBAS010933: Host Controller boot has failed in an unrecoverable manner; exiting. See previous messages for details.

I agree it is mostly right there, however, it took three of us looking at the command line before we noticed the dashes instead of the dots. Any other unused parameters should generate a very clear error message that is as close as possible to the starting of the instance.