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Thanks! I had always figured that, along with long options, they were a GNU thing.

• _delirium 12y ago
  There's some digging here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/147143/when-and-how-was-the-double-dash-introduced-as-an-end-of-options-delimiter http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/147143/when-and-how-... Looks like the convention was introduced as part of getopt in AT&T Unix System III (1980), though initially only in a handful of places. Then POSIX adopted it as standard for all utilities sometime later.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• emmelaich 12y ago
  They were quite distinct. When --longopt was starting to get popular (in an ad-hoc way) for gnu and other utilities there was a poll (gnu.misc? late 90s?) whether to make it a gnu standard. The other choices were a +, or have commands not accept both bundled single letter options and longopts. There may have been other choices I've forgotten about. The double-dash won. There were some people who were concerned that it might be confused with the end-of-args double dash. Maybe that is true but they are certainly unambiguously parsed.