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?
