While this may seem obvious to many people; it was not obvious to me. This little bit of confusion caused me to spin my wheels for a lot longer than I would like. Were it not for an accident, I would still be spinning those wheels.
A quick backgrounder: If you would like to use SharePoint to crawl web sites that use forms-based or cookie-based authentication, you need to install a hotfix; as this capability is not in SharePoint at this time. Additionally, in order to communication proper credentials to the target site one must create a crawl rule that includes this information. Since SharePoint does not allow you to create crawl rules with credentials information, Microsoft provides an addrule command line utility for this purpose.
If you read the page from which you download the tool and the associated MSDN article, you will find that the tool is quite easy to use. You create an XML file with the credentials information; then you pass that XML file as a parameter to the addrule.exe command. After this, you can crawl your target site and all is well.
What the page does not tell you is that the file you download, called addrule.exe, IS NOT THE COMMAND LINE UTILITY! In reality, the addrule.exe file that you download is the setup file that installs the AddRule.exe command line utility onto your computer. If you attempt to use this file as the utility command and pass it the XML file as a parameter, you will get a help popup box that seems oddly out of place.
So there you have it. Probably a lapse in brain function on my part, but understandably confusing.
