Has nobody heard of "--" ? This is the standard unix way of saying "Please, do not process flags beyond this point". cat -- * does precisely what I expect it to do in most contexts.
He mentions it further down in the article, but not all commands support '--'. Most notably: echo is not required to support that (which I believe means that while some implementations do support '--', a fully portable script can't assume that it does).
One frequently sees scripts relying on the GNU extensions to echo, often the support for escape characters, in installation scripts for commercial (but also the one for oh-my-zsh...) software when not run on a OS where sh is symlinked to bash (but to a simpler shell).
\033[0;1m ** CONGRATULATIONS! **\033[0m
Your program is now installed.
