Strange mistakes seen in tickets

There are several variants of the dash (minus sign) ...

A user complained that they got the error:

/usr/lib64/gcc/x86_64-suse-linux/14/../../../../x86_64-suse-linux/bin/ld: cannot find -–version: No such file or directory
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

when running gfortran --version.

It turns out that besides the minus sign, there is also the "short long dash" and the "long dash". You can get the short long dash on a Mac keyboard with OPTION+- and the long dash with OPTION+SHIFT+-.

To the function that is usually used to interpret command line options, they are not equivalent to the minus-sign, and hence –-version with a short long dash or long dash at the start (or for both) is interpreted as a regular string, so for this command, a filename and the linker is called who of course cannot find the file.