What is the double dash in this bash script excerpt doing

Question

I\'m looking at an excerpt of bash and I\'m trying to understand what exactly is happening here, particularly in the COMPREPLY assignment:

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Answer 1

The meaning of -- really depends on the program you are executing. In this example compgen. Check the documentation of this program, it should be explained there.

A common convention that is not necessarily always followed is to treat everything after -- as arguments, and do not try to parse as options or flags. As a concrete example, consider the case of running the GNU ls command to get a detailed listing of a file named -t. Running ls -l -t will treat -t as an option (order output by time), not as a filename argument. The solution is ls -l -- -t, this way ls will not try to parse the arguments after --. This is just a convention and not all programs may follow it. Note also that I wrote GNU ls not just ls, because other implementations may behave differently.