Re: Files beginning with a minus sign

[Kaz Kylheku]

On 28 Mar 2003, Ronald Petty wrote:

> What about 
> 
> cvs commit "-filename.txt"

The " " characters are not part of a command line argument; they
are just lexical syntax processed by the shell, affecting how it
tokenizes the command line, and also affects the semantics of
certain expansions. For example, in a script or shell function,
the syntax:

  "$@" 

will expand the arguments such that quotes are placed around each
one. Thus that the command line structure is preserved when the
result of the expansion is re-tokenized.

The token "-abc" means exactly the same thing as -abc .