Simple question regarding touch and mv

[Tom Horsley]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 10:59:09 -0800
Daniel B. Thurman wrote:

> Is this some
> quirkiness in the way command arguments are
> being handled?

No quirkiness. Options start with -, putting quotes around a
string doesn't change the fact that it starts with a -, it
just changes the work the shell does to parse the option before
passing it to the command. I have no idea who is parsing what
when you pass '\-foo' though :-).

The reliable way to pass anything to most commands is to tell
the command you are done with options and everything else is
a positional argument by using the -- option terminator:

touch -- -foo

Naturally, it depends on the command if it interprets -- that
way or not, but 90% of the standard utility commands like
mv, cp, touch, etc do in fact look for --.

Another technique some people use for things that are filenames
is this:

touch ./-foo