On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Kevin P. Neal wrote:

> Just about all command line Unix programs use getopt() for argument
> parsing, so just about all command line Unix program will allow this
> trick to work:

This is described in the getopt manual page: "The special option ``--'' is
used to delimit the end of the options."

But it is not described in the rmdir manual page. I wonder if a note
about this should be added to the rmdir manual page.

You also could have simply done:
 rmdir ls -al ## the first time

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/