What is the purpose of the : (colon) GNU Bash builtin?

Question

What is the purpose of a command that does nothing, being little more than a comment leader, but is actually a shell builtin in and of itself?

It\'s slower than inse

Answer 1

A useful application for : is if you're only interested in using parameter expansions for their side-effects rather than actually passing their result to a command. In that case you use the PE as an argument to either : or false depending upon whether you want an exit status of 0 or 1. An example might be : "${var:=$1}". Since : is a builtin it should be pretty fast.