Lily Ballard [off-list ref] writes:
I haven’t checked any other commands that the glossary lists as
taking pathspecs (except `git add`, which does properly list it as
taking pathspecs), so I don’t know if any of the other commands
incorrectly list themselves as taking files when they take
pathspecs.
I do not offhand think of a command that only takes pathname,
including "ls-files". New users would think "git cmd README" is
taking a single filename "README", and "ls-files" doc uses "file"
in a misguided attempt to be "newbie friendly", but it always has
used that "README" string as a pattern to match paths against.