Re: [Help-bash] Glob star pattern does not match files beginning with a period

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 08:18:50AM -0700, Michael Convey wrote:
> In the man pages, I could not find any other instances of this use of '--'
> to signify the end of the options. Therefore, only bash builtin command man
> page explicitly state that they follow this convention. According to 'type
> ls', this command is not a bash builtin; so how do we know this convention
> works?

On a GNU system, "man ls" does not give the full manual, because the
people who write GNU man pages hate man pages and want you to use
friggin' emacs to read their documentation.

SEE ALSO
       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ls>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) ls invocation'

On a non-GNU system, the man pages are often better, but you're still at
the mercy of whoever wrote them.

Since ls is a POSIX standard command, you can reasonably expect that your
local version of ls will support at LEAST the features required by POSIX,
and -- is one of these.  -- to terminate options is required behavior for
every POSIX command except, I think, echo.

P.S. if you try to use the info program and can't abide it, try pinfo.
It has a much better user interface, at the cost of some features.