Inserting a Minus in a Shell Command

I recently had to use a negative value with a parted command in a script for partitioning a drive up to a certain point before the end of the drive. If it were only for a single size of drive then I could have hard-coded the end point. But, alas, it wasn’t. Fortunately I remembered a great tip from Unix Haters Handbook (a great read, btw) of all places on this very topic. Simply use a double minus before the value to tell the command not to process what comes after as an option. ie.

parted /dev/sdb mkpart primary fat32 1000000s -- -10000