According to Cucumber.io there are 2 styles in which a tag expression can be defined. For your specific case, to exclude steps or features marked with @ignore, these 2 styles translate into:
- old style :
cucumber --tags ~@ignore - new style :
cucumber --tags "not @ignore".
To my surprise, using the same cucumber-js v1.3.1 running on Node.js v6.9.2, I found that the Windows version accepted only the new style, while the Linux one accepted only the old style. Depending on your setup, you may want to try both and see if you succeed with any of them.