Handling filenames that contains a hyphen, within a script

Question

I have few files that was incorrectly encoded, during extraction, file names now become something similar to -a -b,

Now I'm trying to fix this issue with:

convmv -f ENCODING -t utf8 --notest *

But got:

Unknown option: a
Unknown option: b

So what's the right way to handle it, in a script ?

Answer 1

Because -a and -b start with - the command thinks they are options. To prevent that stick a -- before the list of filenames like this:

convmv -f ENCODING -t utf8 --notest -- *

That way everything after -- will be treated as regular arguments without trying to process them as options.

This is common in a lot of unix commands.