Was : actually designed for commenting? If so, at what point did it become a command that always returns zero exit status? Was it always built-in, or did it originally have a separate filesystem existence (like "[")? Python has a useful "pass" command, but : is much nicer because you can "comment" out a single command in (e.g.) an if/then and it remains syntactically valid and executable. I find it very elegant.

Terry

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 10:40 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020, 3:11 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
On Sun, 5 Jan 2020, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> The Unix philosophy, perhaps i.e. keep it simple? Why have ":" (an
> actual internal Shell command) when "" (the null command) will do the
> job?

Also, remember that ":" was also used as a comment, before "#" was used.

I thought it was a null label for a goto target... :)

Warner

-- Dave