At last, a hope of progress

Actually, the shell could help a bit. At least one thing that it could do would be to ignore files starting with a dash when expanding '*', the same way it ignores files starting with a dot. I don't know if that would be POSIX compliant, but there are more bad reasons than good for that sort of expansion. Recognising ASCII-zero as a separator for file names in a text stream might also be useful, although I have no idea what other implications that would have, and it would probably fail under many circumstances.