Our Windows installation documentation says to create a skeletal configuration file in the legacy config file format by creating it like this:

echo logpath=C:\mongodb\log\mongo.log > "C:\mongodb\mongod.cfg"

This format does not work (at least with Windows Server 2012R2 and PowerShell), and it will cause an error similar to this:

"Error parsing INI config file: unknown option ■l"

This issue comes up over and over.

The solution is to change the Windows installation instructions to create a config file in YAML format.