Hey, it happens! I'm confident some of the flags I provide git daily do nothing meaningful either ;) Edit: I also googled it, as I thought up a reason why -- m

Hey, it happens! I'm confident some of the flags I provide git daily do nothing meaningful either ;) Edit: I also googled it, as I thought up a reason why -- might be used. If I have a file called master, and want to unstage my changes to it, I would have to `git checkout master`. Given this command has multiple meanings, both of which could be appropriate, I'd need to disambiguate between them. The -- does exactly this, it prevents the tree-ish parsing.