Last night I accidentally came across something really funny. Did you know that there’s a /bin/true that just does nothing, successfully?

This is a really amazing mapage:

NAME
true - do nothing, successfully

SYNOPSIS
true [ignored command line arguments]
true OPTION
 
DESCRIPTION
Exit with a status code indicating success.
 
These option names may not be abbreviated.
 
--help display this help and exit
 
--version
output version information and exit
 
AUTHOR
Written by Jim Meyering.

I think you can do things like that with “true”:

while /bin/true; do sleep 5; kill ...; done

At least the most bizzare thing about it is that the version is 5.96.