July 25, 2026
Colon drama: : fights back
A shell colon does nothing. Use it anyway
One tiny punctuation mark just started a huge fight over how ugly coding should be
TLDR: A blogger showed how a simple colon can make tiny command-line scripts shorter and cleaner. Readers instantly split into camps: some called it a neat trick, while others said it’s confusing, misleading, and proof this old scripting language is chaos.
A humble blog post about the colon key somehow turned into full-on comment section theater. The writer’s big reveal was that a lonely little ":" in shell scripts can quietly help check missing inputs, set fallback values, blank out log files, and generally make short command-line scripts less repetitive. In plain English: it’s a tiny symbol that does almost nothing, and that’s exactly why some people love it.
But the community? Absolutely split. A few readers admitted the trick is clever in small doses, especially for showing a clear error when a required value is missing. Others came in swinging, saying several examples were misleading, unnecessary, or just plain messy. One critic complained the file-clearing example doesn’t just empty a file — it can also create one — which, in tutorial land, is apparently a crime. Another basically accused the post of promoting the coding equivalent of decorative parsley: technically there, but why?
Then came the real drama: the anti-shell crowd. One commenter declared life is too short for this "nightmare" of a language and said people should just use Python or TypeScript instead. Ouch. Readability complaints piled on too, with one sleepy reader saying this looked awful even by shell-script standards. The funniest jab? Calling the colon "the appendix of the shell" — useless, mysterious, and somehow still causing pain. Tiny symbol, huge feelings.
Key Points
- •The article explains that the shell builtin `:` is a null command that evaluates its arguments and discards the result.
- •It shows that `: "${1:?missing argument, aborting.}"` can replace a multi-line argument check for required shell script inputs.
- •The article states that `${name:?diagnostic}` prints an error to stderr and exits with a non-zero status when the variable is unset or empty.
- •It presents multiple uses of `:` including default variable assignment, file truncation via redirection, trap handlers, variable checks under `set -u`, and no-op branches in conditionals.
- •The FAQ explains that using `:` before parameter expansion prevents the expanded text from being treated as a command while still allowing expansion side effects such as variable assignment.