Quoted text is handled as option

[nerg4l]

Given the following doc:

Usage:
  naval_fate.py a <name>...
  naval_fate.py b -- <name>...

The following commands are faling regardless of single-quotes (') or double-quotes ("):

a "-a"
a "--a"
a '-a'
a '--a'

And these are correct regardless of the quotes and the number of dashes:

a "-"
a " -a"
a -- "-a" # parsed as two parameter
a -- "-b" # parsed as one parameter

In the docs there is a section about double dash -- which can be used to "separate options and positional arguments". I can use that to avoid this as you can see the second usage pattern of the example.

I don't think it is intended behaviour but I can be wrong.

According to https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Quoting

Enclosing characters in single quotes (‘'’) preserves the literal value of each character within the quotes.

Enclosing characters in double quotes (‘"’) preserves the literal value of all characters within the quotes, with the exception of ‘$’, ‘`’, ‘\’, and, when history expansion is enabled, ‘!’.

A could only find this in the IEEE Std 1003.1-2017 specs https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_02

Quoting is used to remove the special meaning of certain characters or words to the shell. Quoting can be used to preserve the literal meaning of the special characters in the next paragraph, prevent reserved words from being recognized as such, and prevent parameter expansion and command substitution within here-document processing [...]

[TylerTemp]

This is likely to be an bash (or whatever cli tty you are using)'s arguments feature.

a simple python example:

import sys
print(sys.argv[1:])

a simple bash example:

echo $@

Both scripts will parse quote and will not pass quote to the script argv.

Thus,

a "-a"  # result: a -a
a "--a"  # result: a --a
a '-a'  # result: a -a
a '--a'  # result: a --a

[pilattebe]

I have a pending pull request to fix this since 2018 here