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16.1 false: Do nothing, unsuccessfully

false does nothing except return an exit status of 1, meaning failure. It can be used as a place holder in shell scripts where an unsuccessful command is needed.

By default, false honors the `--help' and `--version' options. However, that is contrary to POSIX, so when the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, false ignores all command line arguments, including `--help' and `--version'.

This version of false is implemented as a C program, and is thus more secure and faster than a shell script implementation, and may safely be used as a dummy shell for the purpose of disabling accounts.



This document was generated by Jeff Bailey on December, 28 2002 using texi2html