find in directory that starts with dash

If it is in a script you can always check for it. E.g. for bash, ksh or zsh:

if [[ "$DIR" = -* ]]; then    find ./"$DIR"else    find "$DIR"fi

In a more terse form (for bash, ksh93 or zsh):

find "${DIR/#-/./-}"

You can even do this with the parameters of a script, if they are all supposed to be directories:

find "${@/#-/./-}"

This may seem a bit cheap, but I actually recommend the readlink workaround that you've figured out. According to the Unix standard,

The first argument that starts with a '-' (...) and all subsequent arguments shall be interpreted as an expression

so -- will indeed not work. thkala's solution may also work, but I find it less readable. It may be faster though, if you're doing a lot of find invocations.

Here is a way that should work on all Unix-like systems, with no requirement on a specific shell or on a non-standard utility¹.

case $DIR in  -*) DIR=./$DIR;;esacfind "$DIR" …

If you have a list of directories in your positional parameters and want to process them, it gets a little complicated. Here's a POSIX sh solution:

i=1while [ $i -le $# ]; do  case $1 in    -*) x=./$1;;    *) x=$1;;  esac  set -- "$@" "$x"  shift  i=$(($i + 1))donefind "$@" …

Bourne shells and other pre-POSIX sh implementations lack arithmetic and set --, so it's a little uglier.

i=1while [ $i -le $# ]; do  x=$1  case $1 in    -*) x=./$1;;  esac  set a "$@" "$x"  shift  shift  i=`expr $i + 1`donefind "$@" …

¹ _{readlink -f is available on GNU (Linux, Cygwin, etc.), NetBSD ≥4.0, OpenBSD ≥2.2, BusyBox. It is not available (unless you've installed GNU tools, and you've made sure they're in your PATH) on Mac OS X (as of 10.6.4), HP-UX (as of 11.22), Solaris (as of OpenSolaris 200906), AIX (as of 7.1).}