true and false (commands)

true and false are shell commands that exit immediately with exit status 0 or 1, respectively. As a script sets its process exit status to the value of the last command it runs, these commands can be used to set the exit status of a script run. All Unix shells interpret an exit status of zero as success and non-zero (usually) as failure, so true sets success and false sets failure.

true
Initial release	January 1979 (1979-01)
Operating system	Unix and Unix-like
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command

The commands are available in Unix-like operating systems.

Use

The commands are usually employed in conditional statements and loops of shell scripts. For example, the following script repeatedly executes echo hello until interrupted:

while true
do
  echo hello
done

The commands can be used to ignore the success or failure of a sequence of other commands, as in the example:

make … && false

Setting a user's login shell to false, in /etc/passwd, effectively denies them access to an interactive shell, but their account may still be valid for other services, such as FTP. (Although /sbin/nologin, if available, may be more fitting for this purpose, as it prints a notification before terminating the session.)

The programs accept no command-line arguments except that the GNU version accepts the typical --help and --version options.

Null command

The true command is sometimes substituted with the very similar null command, written as a single colon (:). The null command is built into the shell, and may therefore be more efficient if true is an external program (true is usually a shell built in function). We can rewrite the upper example using : instead of true:

while :
do
  echo hello
done

The null command may take parameters, which are ignored. It is also used as a no-op dummy command for side-effects such as assigning default values to shell variables through the ${parameter:=word} parameter expansion form. For example, from bashbug, the bug-reporting script for Bash:

 : ${TMPDIR:=/tmp}
 : ${EDITOR=$DEFEDITOR}
 : ${USER=${LOGNAME-`whoami`}}

Null smileys

Either true or : can be used as a replacement for cat /dev/null, so there are 3 "null smileys":

:> - create a file or empty it if it already exists;

:>> - create a file if it doesn't exist, unlike touch it does not change the timestamp of existing file;

:| - can be used instead of < /dev/null

Such usage is similar to the IEFBR14's standard usage.

See also

• IEFBR14 – "Do nothing" program on IBM mainframes
• List of POSIX commands
• Two-valued logic – Classical logic of two values, either true or falsePages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets

External links

• true: return true value – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 5 from The Open Group
• false: return false value – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 5 from The Open Group

Manual pages

• true(1): Do nothing, successfully – GNU Coreutils reference
• false(1): Do nothing, unsuccessfully – GNU Coreutils reference
• true(1): Return true value – FreeBSD manual page
• false(1): Return false value – FreeBSD manual page