In the tl-config man page, we have the following entry under OPTIONS: > -a, --all-entries > Print all parameters and folders in given folder. In reality, tl-config does not treat -a as a switch, but rather an option with a the hiveconf folder as its parameter. To examplify, according to the man page grammar, both of these two should be correct: > tl-config -aR / > tl-config -Ra / In practice though, only the latter is valid. Being a bit nitpicky, with the hiveconf folder taken as an non-positional parameter, the positional hiveconf folder in the SYNOPSIS is not mandatory (even though it is marked as such). Both of the tl-config examples above omit this positional argument.