The brunerd blog has been a whole lot of nothing lately, so let’s commemorate and celebrate with an entry featuring the premiere of the bash tag and category… hmm, which one is more useful? We’ll find out. Now as for nothing, there’s a legit command, special built-in to do nothing in bash!
man page for bash command :
: [arguments]
No effect; the command does nothing beyond expanding arguments and performing any specified redirections. A zero exit code is returned.
Isn’t that lovely? When you need to do nothing, you can call :
Perhaps you are writing a script and aren’t sure what you’ll do for that if statement —
if [ "${this}" == "that" ]; then
#actually not sure what to do here, let's do nothing
:
else
echo "This else, I'll do"
fi
I made a gist here and I think I’ll keep making more. I’ll feature them here with the bash tag, if only as an auxillary backup of my brain and to add to the collective patchwork quilt of code we all use to get our ideas off the ground, when our reach is just a hare shy of grasp and we need a little help.
Also in the gist was a snippet of a novel use by kbeck at Extensis in his UTC removal script to use : to redirect a here document into itself and server as a comment block that doesn’t need # on every line to be treated as a comment —
: <<COMMENTBLOCK
[ ] 2016-0324: enclose me; love me. i am a block of comments
COMMENTBLOCK
Spiffy!