Basic question but how can I search the NCBI Nucleotide database using BLAST CLI

Question

[Mark]

I'm trying to run a BLAST through the blastn cli. I thought that providing nt as the -db parameter would let me search the NCBI Nucleotide database with blast, but when I run this command:

blastn -query contigs.fa -db nt

I get this error:

BLAST Database error: Database memory map file error

Does anyone know what is going wrong and how to fix this?

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

-remote is missing Is is possible to use blastn to search on remote database from terminal?

[Mark]

perfect thank you!