I was working with a coworker yesterday. He was having an issue deploying a solution. Reviewing the STSADM command, things looked correct; however, when he hit Enter to run the command, all the STSADM commands would display. Similar to what happens when you run STSADM.EXE -help. Scrolling to the top of the list of commands was the “Command Line Error”. Turns out he was copying the command from a blog post of mine and WordPress must do something with the dashes (similar issue with quotes).
Long story short, instead of copying/pasting STSADM commands, type the command manually. Problem solved.
