I understand the answer and it was courteously given, but just technically speaking, is that a zsh issue? I'm seeing it as the internal problem of ls. Remembering that the shell will do the expansion of the argument, is it in any way up to zsh to parse any '--M*' as special? In other words, Denis' question seems to suppose that it IS somehow up to zsh to handle that, and I'm wondering if that's correct.One (or more) of your files start with the string "--M", you want either ls -- * or ls ./* (or print -rl - *)