A file whose name begins with '-' could not be named at all: passed bare it parses as a flag, and './-x.txt' parses and then matches nothing, because a path is compared literally against the check-in's file list. A forge serving such a repository answered 500 for every content route on that file. Twenty parsers already honoured the marker, including the shared flag scanner behind add, rm, commit and mv; the twenty-five with hand-written loops did not, cat among them. Each now gates its flag branches behind the marker, so operands fall through to the positional handling untouched and '-n' after '--' is a name rather than a limit. Documented as its own help topic rather than an options row in thirty-nine verbs: '--' is not a verb's option, it is the rule every verb parses by. check-in: 85a1d4bf3f user: dmestas tags: trunk