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

You could use it in conjunction with backticks (``) to execute a command without displaying its output, like this:

: `some_command`

Of course you could just do some_command > /dev/null, but the :-version is somewhat shorter.

That being said I wouldn't recommend actually doing that as it would just confuse people. It just came to mind as a possible use-case.