Unix command that takes no arguments

Question

Don't ask why, but is there a Unix command that takes no arguments?

Are you looking for a command that would error if given arguments, or that just don't process their arguments? I'm not immediately thinking of any in the former category (though one would be easy to create, and they may well exist), but the latter category has various examples. And of course there are many unix commands that do something useful without any arguments, but I'm guessing that's not what you're asking.

Mikel · Answer 1 · 2011-02-22 09:59:10Z

up vote 4 down vote

true and false are two examples.

Or did you mean commands that take no options? I can't think of any, but the original Unix version of echo didn't take any options. There's even a story about it how it came to take options.

edited Feb 22 '11 at 9:59

answered Feb 22 '11 at 9:53

Mikel
13.2k2751

yes is another one. – asoundmove Feb 22 '11 at 12:44

1

@asoundmove yes doesn't require an argument, but it does accept/use one. – gnud Feb 22 '11 at 13:43

1

As is so often the case, this largely depends on what Unix implementation you are using. Yes, POSIX doesn't specify any arguments for true, but that doesn't stop the GNU project: true --help yields

Aufruf: /bin/true NAME
 oder:  /bin/true OPTION
Aufruf: %s [ignorierte Kommandzeilen-Argument]
 oder:  %s OPTION
Mit einem Status-Code beenden, der erfolgreiche Ausführung signalisiert.

(21 lines total.) You'll notice that it is even localized! – Jörg W Mittag Feb 22 '11 at 19:32

mmckinst · Answer 2 · 2011-02-22 14:19:51Z

nologin takes no arguments and is widely available on Linux and BSD.

On CentOS 4 and 5, the arch command takes no arguments. On other linux distros, arch is now provided by GNU coreutils which takes --version and --help. With CentOS 4 and 5 it comes from util-linux which differs from GNU's version.

A lot of the things in GNU coreutils take only --help and --version, if you look at different Unixes that don't use GNU coreutils, they don't accept any arguments: sync, true, false, whoami, pwd, groups, users

amphetamachine · Answer 3 · 2011-02-22 16:12:04Z

up vote 2 down vote

:, true, false, reset, clear, line, chkdupexe and arch all take no arguments.

I'm sure they accept them, but they ignore them.

answered Feb 22 '11 at 16:12

amphetamachine
2,1301623

OMG.. true and false are commands!... must try this: true; echo $? ... 0 | false; echo $? ... 1 ... yup! ... an ineresting bit if info... bash is different :) – Peter.O Feb 22 '11 at 17:17

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Unix command that takes no arguments

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