[latexrefman] Hmm ...

[Karl Berry]

    Usage: pdftex [OPTION]... [TEXNAME[.tex]] [COMMANDS]

Now I understand. It's a feature I've never actually used -- more argv
after the first are treated as if they were a second (normal) line of input.

 pdftex story.tex '\message{x}'

does indeed \input story and then output "x". It's not specific to
pdftex. All the engines, including original tex, parse the command line
this way. I believe the behavior has been there essentially forever. (Of
course this was an extension in the Unix port, not anything done by
Knuth.)

I guess it's worth mentioning, briefly, for the sake of the manual's
"reference" nature.

    for what was really an incomplete commit yesterday.

Oh, don't give it a second thought. If it's not obvious, I've been happy
to give over the document to you as you see fit.

    I removed latex-info from the to-do list.  

Yay!!  --thanks so much, karl.