Dashes in printf

The -- is used to tell the program that whatever follows should not be interpreted as a command line option to printf.

Thus the printf "--" you tried basically ended up as "printf with no arguments" and therefore failed.

-- is being interpreted as an option (in this case, to signify that there are no more options).

A format string should always be included when using printf to prevent bad interpretation. For your particular case:

printf '%s\n' '-----------------------'

There are differences between printf builtin and /usr/bin/printf, the second one do "what you mean" without these annoying errors.

printf "-----"             # error
printf -- "-----"          # ok
/usr/bin/printf "-----"    # ok
/usr/bin/printf -- "-----" # ok