What would cause a CLI utility to ignore arguments except when invoked directly? Okay, so this just happened:

iMac:bin nreilingh$ tree --version
.
|____tree
iMac:bin nreilingh$ which tree
/usr/local/bin/tree
iMac:bin nreilingh$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/tree
lrwxr-xr-x  1 nreilingh  admin  29 Oct 14 22:02 /usr/local/bin/tree -&gt; ../Cellar/tree/1.7.0/bin/tree
iMac:bin nreilingh$ pwd
/usr/local/Cellar/tree/1.7.0/bin
iMac:bin nreilingh$ ./tree --version
tree v1.7.0 (c) 1996 - 2014 by Steve Baker, Thomas Moore, Francesc Rocher, Florian Sesser, Kyosuke Tokoro 


I installed tree via homebrew, and whenever I invoke it, it ignores command line arguments. When I execute the binary directly, it doesn't. How is this possible?
Maybe tree is defined as a function or alias in your .bashrc or .profile file?

Check output of \tree --version