Not quite. I believe the point is that it's not an edge case, since "master" isn't a particularly unusual name, not in the Unix tradition, nor, AFAIK, on any ot

Not quite. I believe the point is that it's not an edge case, since "master" isn't a particularly unusual name, not in the Unix tradition, nor, AFAIK, on any other OS. You'll note that, for example, your "rm" didn't require a double-hyphen. The OC's point (and maybe the GP's point [1]), ultimately, is about git command syntax ambiguity. With traditional Unix commands, there's not much ambiguity. At worst, there's merely no obvious way to pass an argument that's a filename starting with a hyphen. The question "what does 'ls -l' do?" would not plausibly have an answer of "output '-l' if a directory entry with that name exists" in addition to "output a long listing of all directory entries". [1] Does git actually behave differently based on the existence of a directory entry named "master" or does it merely require extra effort to work with such an entry, which would actually be directly analagous to filenames beginning with a hyphen?