dbaccess syntax

I am probably being rather stupid here and there is bound to be a perfectly straight forward answer. For reasons I wont bore you with, I am required to access an informix database from a remote machine using dbaccess. Everything is fine with the comms as I can run dbaccess itself from the remote machine. My problem however is that it was my understanding that you could call dbaccess with arguments to execute a query and have the results returned to you. we are running dbaccess <name_of_database> - SQL_QUERY Ive tried to keep the query as simple as possible (suchhe as select * from tablename) so I know its not an sql or wrongly phrased query. The problem is that the process doesnt run, it simply places me into the dbaccess prompt where I have to enter the query again. I have searched through the documentation for dbaccess but cant find anything giving me any help on the syntax for dbaccess from the command line. Can anybody help me with the switches I should use please?