The Kafka documentation here ( http://kafka.apache.org/081/documentation.html#topic-config) mentions the following as an example:
*> bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --create --topic my-topic --partitions 1 --replication-factor 1 --config max.message.bytes=64000 --config flush.messages=1* and *> bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --alter --topic my-topic --config max.message.bytes=128000* The configs must be put in double quotes here, i.e. *--config *"*flush.messages=1".* The documentation for 0.8.2 also would need the correction. Regards, Soumyajit Sahu