Pandoras Box

Arguments passed to an application are positional. This means they have a specific order in which they appear. But some can be logically declared as Flags. How this is done, however, is entirely up to the author.

POSIX

A commonly used convention where longhands have a -- and shorthands a - prefix. They may appear interspersed with positional arguments and some are repeatable. Shorthands can also be chained.

Non-POSIX

Then there are other approaches that in most cases arguably aren't a good idea.

Like shorthands with more than one character which prevents chaining. Or the abuse of flags as subcommands. And non-interspersed mode, which may be easier to parse, but limits UX. Some even mix different formats.

Carapace forked pflag to support these. But avoid them if you can.

Dash

The -- argument is a special case and disables flag parsing for arguments following it. However, how it is handled differs between applications. Many simply continue the positional arguments. But some, like gh repo clone, use it for something else.