The Null Command: A Bash Command that does nothing but is still useful | Linux Today

The Null Command: A Bash Command that does nothing but is still useful

Written By
N
Nicolas
May 27, 2020

The Bash Null command, also known as the Shell colon command due to the command name being the colon “:” character. This builtin command doesn’t do anything but can still be quite helpful either to do block comments in Bash, write debug logs, or even to assign a variable if not already set.

N

Nicolas

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