Agreed! Shell scripting would be so much more sane (and safe) if filenames couldn't contain spaces (or control chars) and couldn't begin with a '-' character.

Agreed! Shell scripting would be so much more sane (and safe) if filenames couldn't contain spaces (or control chars) and couldn't begin with a '-' character. Then the shell's default $IFS would work as intended in the presence of pathname expansion, and there would be no need to use '--' to delineate the filename arguments from the option arguments when executing commands.