Daniel B. Thurman wrote: > > I wonder why this fails: > > # touch '-foo' > touch: invalid option -- 'o' > > # touch '\-foo' (works) > # mv '-foo' foo > mv: invalid option -- 'o' > Try `mv --help' for more information. > > What confuses me is, if foo was surrounded by > double-quotes, then expansion may be a problem > but with single-quotes, no expansion is performed, > so why does both commands fail? Is this some > quirkiness in the way command arguments are > being handled? > > Just wondered, > Dan > The error, "touch: invalid option -- 'o' " comes from touch, not from shell. Shell does indeed ignore the '-foo' option and passes it in as a string to touch, after removing the single quotes. So touch interprets it just as if it was called this way: touch -foo -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines