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

I saw this usage in a script and thought it was a good substitute for invoking basename within a script.

oldIFS=$IFS  
IFS=/  
for basetool in $0 ; do : ; done  
IFS=$oldIFS  

... this is a replacement for the code: basetool=$(basename $0)