Running this in a shell such as bash or zsh will not produce the sometimes-expected result of looking up issues under the help wanted label:

# doesn't work:
gh issue list -l help wanted

This is because the value help wanted should be quoted or escaped in one's shell to ensure that it's passed as a single value to --label, rather than as two distinct arguments help + wanted (where the latter wouldn't be interpreted as relating to --label at all):

# works:
gh issue list -l "help wanted"

# also works:
gh issue list -l help\ wanted

This isn't a bug with CLI, but is a common pitfall for shell-users in general that we could ideally help our users detect and recover from. Possible approaches:

• Include example of passing labels with spaces in gh help issue list docs
• Detect extra, unaccounted arguments to gh issue list ("wanted" in the above example) and present an error such as “unrecognized argument 'wanted': did you forget to quote values with spaces?”

Originally reported by @tierninho

Loosely related issues that stem as consequence of shell behavior (as opposed to being bugs in gh): #223 #595 #315