I was reading through the fix for a package manager CVE last week and ran into a git flag I’d somehow never noticed: --end-of-options . My first reaction was that some LLM had hallucinated it, but it’s documented in gitcli(7) , it was added in git 2.24.0 in November 2019, and it exists because git had already used -- for something else.

In most Unix tools -- marks the end of option parsing, so rm -- -f removes a file called -f rather than passing the force flag. Git had repurposed -- early on to separate revisions from pathspecs, because git log foo on its own is ambiguous between a branch named foo and a file named foo and one of the two readings needed a marker: git log main -- README.md means commits on main touching that file.…