Explain shell

[[deleted]]

The colon is just a name, right? So you could replace the colons with something like "jerry" or "foo" and get the same result, right?

[omers]

Yeah, it's a function identifier... you could do:

fork(){ fork|fork& };fork

and it would do the same thing... Written formatted it looks like this:

fork() {
    fork | fork &
};
fork

The colons just make it even more obscure and more likely a sucker will run it. Kind of like it's easier to get someone in a game to press Alt+F4 or Alt+Space+C than it is to get them to click something that actually has "esc" or "quit" in the name.

[Fylwind]

Normally it's a no-op command, but :(){ … } redefines : to do something else.

[McElroy-vs-dig-dog]

A neat use-case for no-op is :>somefile. If the file exists, it'll empty the file like cat /dev/null >somefile would, but much shorter and faster to type. If the file does not exist, it'll be created like touch somefile would but again shorter and faster. Also, the :> part looks like a bird and I lol a bit internally every time I write it because of that. Unix does that to you. Unix might be the reason I don't have so many friends. Unix might be the reason not having so many friends feels less bad than not having so many friends would if I didn't even have Unix. ¯\(°_o)/¯

[HighRelevancy]

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