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5.2 true: Do nothing, successfully

true does nothing except return an exit status of 0, meaning success. It can be used as a place holder in shell scripts where a successful command is needed, although the shell built-in command : (colon) does the same thing faster.

true ignores all command line arguments, even `--help' and `--version', since to do otherwise would change expected behavior that some programmers may be relying on.

This version of true is implemented as a C program, and is thus more secure and faster than a shell script implementation, and may safely be used as a dummy shell for the purpose of disabling accounts.


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