Indeed, it is not the fault of bash but of the Unix command line in general. Made worse by the fact that different tools may have different conventions. Often, "--" will save you, but not always. And by the way, it took me years to become aware of "--", which is exactly the reason why I hate shell scripting: a non-obvious problem, with a non-obvious solution that doesn't always work.

One of GP arguments in favor of PowerShell is that most commands are builtin, so this problem can be solved by the shell itself, and furthermore, it is based on strongly typed objects, which should make it clear what is a file and what is a command line option. And I think he has a point. Regular command line parsing is a mess on Windows though.

In "real" programming languages, library APIs are usually favored over command lines, and they are usually designed in such a way that options and file arguments are distinct. You may still need to run commands at some point, but you are not reliant on them for every detail, which, in traditional shell scripting includes trivial things like "echo", "true", "false", "test", etc... Now usually builtin.

As for bash "doing something about it", it would greatly benefit from a linter. I know they exist, but I don't know if it is standard practice to use them.

> Wait! The fact that arguments with a leading hyphen are interpreted as options is not bash's fault. It's ingrained in the convention of UNIX tools and there's nothing bash can do to mitigate it. You would have the same problem if you got rid of any shell and directly invoked commands from Python or C.

A better system shell could make it easy to define shims for the existing programs. Also it could make their calling easier, e.g. with named arguments. So when you wanted to delete your file called -rf, you would say

  rm(file="-rf")

or something like that, with your preferred syntax. It would be much safer than just pass big strings as arguments, where spaces separate the different arguments, also spaces can appear in the arguments, also arguments can be empty. Bash or Posix sh is not very good at safely invoking other programs, or at handling files.

What you're suggesting is that the shell should have every possible command builtin and not call external programs.

Let's analyze your example with 'rm': it works as long as 'rm' is an internal routine. If it's an external program, independently of the syntax you use to specify the arguments, sooner or later the shell will need to actually call the 'rm' executable, and to pass '-rf' to it as argument number 1. The 'rm' executable will then examine its arguments, see that the first one begins with a hyphen and interpret it as an option.

As I said, the only way to avoid all this would be to replace 'rm' with an internal routine. Then you would replace 'cp' and 'ln', and what else? Of course 'echo' and 'printf', 'cat', 'ls', 'cd' maybe, why not 'find' and 'grep'? What about 'head', 'tail', 'cut'? Don't forget 'sed' and 'awk'... the list is getting longer and longer. Where do you draw the line?

Seriously, the only mitigation would be to define a function to 'sanitize' an argument to make it appear as a file if used as an argument to an external program. Something like:

  force_file() {
    case "$1" in
      -*) echo "./$1" ;;
      *)  echo "$1" ;;
    esac

}

This doesn't work with 'echo' though.