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

: can also be for block comment (similar to /* */ in C language). For example, if you want to skip a block of code in your script, you can do this:

: << 'SKIP'

your code block here

SKIP