A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway | Hacker News

A Hacker News thread debated POSIX shell quirks, with a focus on the colon no-op builtin and parameter expansion tricks.

Commenters argued over shell’s reliability for scripting, especially around portability, validation, and error handling.

The discussion highlighted common pitfalls like filenames with spaces and command-length limits, alongside idioms experienced users depend on.

Several participants noted that the colon command is still useful in scripts for checks, defaults, and forcing errors on missing variables.