I often use the “-” symbol to separate parts of a long filename. For example, my photos are systematically named things like “20130214-1123-34_some_event.jpg”. For filename maintenance I regularly use the rename command, which allows me to do things like
rename some another *
which would replace the word “some” with the word “another” for every filename in the current directory. When I need to replace a chunk of filename starting with the “-” character, the rename command thinks I’m passing it an option. I’ve just found a helpful answer that shows how the “end-of-options” signal fixes this problem. This signal is simply a double dash “–“. For example, this command
rename — -11 -10 *
would change the timezone on a bunch of photo filenames.