Bash Command to Do Nothing with Example

When you want to run a command in Bash that does nothing then you can make use of the colon command (:). It is also called a null command.

Example:

$ :
$

As you can see when I just ran the : command it executed successfully and the bash prompt was returned.

To show that the command was a success, let us add some logic.

$ : && echo "The command was successful" || echo "The command failed"

The command was successful

Why would one use "do nothing" command?

The "do nothing" command is mostly useful in bash scripts, where you have a requirement to satisfy the requirement of having a command as a placeholder that allows the script to continue executing without performing any specific action.




Script Example:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Some logic before doing nothing..."
:
echo "Some logic after doing nothing..."