git's data model is incredibly powerful and flexible, but its UX is famously... interesting:

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/

The Single UNIX Specification mentions the "--" convention in 1997 (at which point it was already in widespread use): https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xbd/utilconv.h...

The first release of git was in 2005, and Torvalds' Linux was clearly UNIX-inspired, so it's not like this was due to considerations for some other OS like DOS/Windows.

It sounds like they didn't need (at the time) to separate arguments from options, but they did need to separate revisions from pathspecs. So they repurposed "--" as the most familiar separator.

Probably they were trying to use familiar conventions, but when they later needed to separate arguments from options, that was a closer match for what other people were using "--" for, but it was too late.

Since it separates out the pathspec, doesn't that match the long standing convention?

When something appears to be poorly designed, then the deeper explanation is often that it’s indeed poorly designed.

Flags for Unix tools have never been friendly.

One of the undeniable benefits of LLMs is that the end of guessing and remembering commands is now optional.

Now we can all run important CLI programs like Zork without a 'command doesn't exist' to command ratio of 1:4

Sometimes you're using git in a context where you don't control the filenames, or where a potential attacker could influence or fully control them, at which point edge cases like this can easily turn into exploits.

I also chafe whenever I run into artificial restrictions on things like characters in names of things, because there's no good reason for them besides the laziness of developers or the limitations and inertia of existing systems that might be used under the hood, like DNS for instance.

> why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do tha

Oh, the famous "you're holding it wrong". For one, that's a ridiculous limitation to place on the user, that's a pretty basic symbol, but also imagine someone else did that and you can't change it because it's outside of your control

It's from 2019, so it's hardly a recent development.

It's also very discoverable if you see it in the wild. You may be surprised that `--` doesn't work, but you won't be surprised `--end-of-options` represents the end of options.

What problem does this actually cause you? What additional complexity has adding this feature added to your development cycle?

why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash?

Because it's my computer, not yours, and I'll do what I want with it?

Like the von Neumann architecture. Your data can be misused as code.

Don't see that we get rid of either command lines in text or von Neumann any time soon.

What are the advantages over structured text?

Currently, git log -- a -- prints all commits that affects the files whose name is a or two dashes.

I don't think you need object orientation for that. Haskell and Rust solve these problems also just fine, without any OOP in sight.

It is an en dash, not an em dash, since it's about as wide as an n.

Some software substitutes a double hyphen -- with an en dash rather than em, and use the triple hyphen --- for the em dash. Perhaps Hacker News' title formatter is one of them.

From the title I've learned that git uses an em-dash instead of double dash as options delimiter. Thanks for pointing out that the title was wrong -- I've never had a need to use -- with git, so didn't know that it doesn't work.

I'm sure I typed double-hyphen when submitting the post, but probably HN auto-formatted the title. IDK really.

Absolute another level of lazy if you need an LLM to git for you.