true and false (commands)

In Unix-like operating systems, true and false are commands whose only function is to always return with a predetermined exit status. Programmers and scripts often use the exit status of a command to assess success (exit status zero) or failure (non-zero) of the command. The true and false commands represent the logical values of command success, because true returns 0, and false returns 1.^{[Note 1]}

The commands are usually employed in conditional statements and loops of shell scripts. For example, the following shell script repeats the echo hello loop 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 take no "actual" parameters; in the GNU version, the standard parameter --help displays a usage summary and --version displays the program version.

The true command is sometimes substituted with the very similar null command,^[1] 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.^[2] For example, from bashbug, the bug-reporting script for Bash:

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

• List of Unix commands
• Two-valued logic
• IEFBR14

The Wikibook Guide to Unix has a page on the topic of: Commands

• true: return true value – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 4 from The Open Group
• false: return false value – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 4 from The Open Group

• 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