Several days ago I encountered this little issue and I found it was very interesting. 
I got a capacity issue and when I run 'du -sh *' I got error message similar with below:
root@debian:/tmp# du -sh * du: option requires an argument -- 'X' Try 'du --help' for more information.
I have run such commands many many times so I make sure it should be workable, but I still run 'du --help' to read the help manual. Of course I could not find my answer.
While the 'ls *' worked well and the command 'du' was the right one I wanted to use.
root@debian:/tmp# ls * transmission_bromolow-5.2_2.94-17.spk root@debian:/tmp# which du /usr/bin/du root@debian:/tmp# alias root@debian:/tmp# du transmission* 3892 transmission_bromolow-5.2_2.94-17.spk
When I first got this issue, I got confused and had to ignore it to deal with other urgent issue, while this time I decided to find the reason.
I found it soon!
root@debian:/tmp# ls transmission_bromolow-5.2_2.94-17.spk -X root@debian:/tmp# ls -l * -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3983360 Jun 2 21:19 transmission_bromolow-5.2_2.94-17.spk root@debian:/tmp# ls -l total 3892 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3983360 Jun 2 21:19 transmission_bromolow-5.2_2.94-17.spk -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 3 18:07 -X root@debian:/tmp# du -sh * du: option requires an argument -- 'X' Try 'du --help' for more information. root@debian:/tmp# du -sh -- -X 0 -X root@debian:/tmp# rm -- -X root@debian:/tmp# du -sh * 3.9M transmission_bromolow-5.2_2.94-17.spk
The root cause was simple and I believe you could find it easily from the above command output, right?
