Although "--" historically has not been required to be recognized for
certain special builtins that do not take options in POSIX, some other
implementations recognize options for them, requiring scripts to use "--" or
avoid operands starting with "-".
Operands starting with "-" can be avoided with eval by prepending a space,
and cannot occur with break, continue, exit, return and shift as they only
take numbers, nor with times as it does not take operands. With . and exec,
avoiding "-" is not so easy as it may require reimplementing the PATH
search; therefore the current proposal for POSIX is to require recognition
of "--" for them.
We continue to accept other strings starting with "-" as operands to . and
exec, and also "--" if it is alone to . (which would otherwise be invalid
anyway).
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