Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: MIME-tools 5.507 (Entity 5.507) RT-Send-CC: X-RT-Original-Encoding: iso-8859-1 Content-Length: 646 That error message should only occur when you run kinit -k without specifying a client principal name on the command line. Since you clearly are specifying a principal name, my best guess is that we introduced an argument parsing bug on Windows when we added getopt_long() support to the Unix build (in commit 8f9ade8ec50cde1176411085294f85ecfb2820a4 on Feb 24 2016). Specifically, I suspect the "optind" variable as seen by kinit is not set correctly after the call to getopt_long(). Unfortunately, I don't currently have the ability to investigate further without spending a lot of time spinning up a Windows development environment.