command line authentication of mongo fails

I am running mongo 2.2.2 on osx.

When I do the following authentication is going fine:

$ mongo
>> use admin
>> db.auth("uname", "password")

log:

Thu Mar  7 13:51:08 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:63474 #10 (4 connections now open)
Thu Mar  7 13:51:08 [conn10]  authenticate db: admin { authenticate: 1, nonce: "123", user: "uname", key: "456" }

However when I try to authenticate directly from the commandline:

$ mongo admin -u uname -p password

I get the following error:

Thu Mar  7 14:25:52 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 127.0.0.1:63939 #12 (5 connections now open)
Thu Mar  7 14:25:52 [conn12]  authenticate db: admin { authenticate: 1, nonce: "789", user: "uname", key: "147" }
Thu Mar  7 14:25:52 [conn12] auth: key mismatch uname, ns:admin
Thu Mar  7 14:25:52 [conn12] end connection 127.0.0.1:63939 (4 connections now open)

Does anyone know what causes this?

Solution 1:

A password containing special characters, especially the dollar sign, has to be put in single quotes to protect them from the command shell:

$ mongo admin -u uname -p 'password'

Solution 2:

You have to use the --authenticationDatabase to indicate mongodb where to find the user you have created. For example:

mongo admin -u uname -p 'password' --authenticationDatabase admin