[bluefinity]

I don't think that's the reason, you could just quote the filename (which is commonly done if the name contains spaces anyway):

    myapp "-verify.txt"

[jasode]

Relying on quotes as special characters is not that simple to parse either:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/twistylittlepassagesallalike/archive...

That article also doesn't go into the difficulties of quotes in legacy DOS apps. Passing/ignoring quotes in DOS command lines was extremely difficult compared to the Win32 API. The CMD.EXE would eat the quote delimiters and your app wouldn't even see them. (It's been many years since I last tested this so a new OS like Windows 10 may have changed things.)