Solve “Error parsing parameter … : Expected: ‘=’, received: ‘EOF’ for input:” in AWS CLI

The following error might occur when you would like to pass the contents of a file to an AWS CLI command.

Error parsing parameter 'YOUR_PARAMETER': Expected: '=', received: 'EOF' for input:

Amazon web services has very strict rules regarding referring to file contents. When you refer to the content of a file you need to use the file:// protocol. The following example writes the contents of a JSON file to a DynamoDB database.

aws dynamodb batch-write-item --request-items file://your-file.json

By the way, it matters how your file is encoded. For binary files, you can use the fileb:// protocol.

• file:// – The AWS CLI treats the file content as base64-encoded text. For example: –some-param
  file://~/my/path/file-with-base64.txt
• fileb:// – The AWS CLI treats the file content as unencoded binary. For example: –some-param
  fileb://~/my/path/file-with-raw-binary.bin