command line options

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <21370 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Oh, brilliant idea. I just tried it under bourne shell and if you
>happen to have a file that starts with a dash then you lose also as it
>expands. Nothing like magical behavior in a HELP command...
>	..hmm, lessee, how do I get rid of this stupid file "-r"
>	in my directory? guess I'll just use help...oops...
>lose lose. My candidate for this year's cream-pie-in-the face award
>for dumb user interface designs.

Maybe there is no such thing as a good interface for dumb users.

Or perhaps dumb users should be encouraged to put '' around EVERY
argument to every command, since they don't know what is a special
shell metacharacter and what isn't.

Personally I don't keep files around with names starting with -.