Note that this isn't guaranteed to be a no-op for arbitrary "all the stuff". Specifically it won't work for commands involving pipes, or commands involving comm

Note that this isn't guaranteed to be a no-op for arbitrary "all the stuff". Specifically it won't work for commands involving pipes, or commands involving command substitution / process substitution. That is: : bar "$(foo)" : bar <(foo) : < <(foo) bar : bar | foo will all still execute `foo`