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Re:Unix Wildcards Gone Wild by claudius on Monday August 18, 2014 @03:50AM (#8191778)
The reasons given there aren’t really any good:

  1. For “--” to work, all maintainers would have to faithfully use “--” in
     practically every command invocation. That just doesn’t happen in real
     life,  even after decades  of people trying.  People forget it all the
     time;  no one is that consistent,  especially since code seems to work
     without it. Very few commands require it, after all.
So because other people may or may not forget it, I shouldn’t use it in my scripts/day-to-day usage? That’s about as silly as saying that, because other people will write unreadable code anyway I shouldn’t bother with comments, short functions or sensible variable names.

  2. You can’t do  it anyway,  even if you  were perfectly consistent; many
     programs and commands do not support “--”.  POSIX even explicitly for-
     bids echo from  supporting “--”,  and echo must support “-n”  (and GNU
     coreutils echo supports other options too).
This is a problem, but iff you have to use echo for some reason. printf works nearly equally well and supports -- just fine. I may have read somewhere that using printf is actually advocated nowadays, but I’m not sure where and why.
Re:Unix Wildcards Gone Wild by JadeNB on Monday August 18, 2014 @04:38PM (#8194527)
> So because other people may or may not forget it, I shouldn’t use it in my scripts/day-to-day usage?

He specifically mentions that that is not his point, but rather that he is arguing against exactly the sort of "just use '--'" response that one can find in this post:

> Do feel free to use “--” between options and pathnames, when you can do it, as an additional protective measure. But using “--” as your primary (or only) mechanism for dash-prefixed filenames is bad idea.