What does the do character do in the bash shell?

Question

He turned up through the ∴ operator in some rvm installation scripts and could not find information about what he was doing? Is there any documentation there?

Answer 1

I guarantee this is not a bash thing. UNIX is famous for the short duration of its commands, but even this does not go that far :-)

It is possible that RVM can create a script or executable file with this name so that entering it on the command line can do something, but if so, this is a good reason to prevent RVM.

However, as the context looks like this:

 ∴ bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head ) ∴ rvm update ∴ gem update rvm && rvm-install 

I would offer him the invitation used for the shell, not for the command.

Answer 2

He does nothing - it seems to be the symbol that wayneseguin uses for his bash invitation. By default, many can see :~ .

Answer 3

This is a Unicode character 0x2234 meaning "therefore." This is definitely not a bash statement.

I think you found this symbol at http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/ and thought that it would be on the command line. Perhaps they just use it on a website to indicate a shell (usually indicated by # or $).

Answer 4

 cat <<∴ Very unlikely to find an accidental ∴ at the beginning of a line in a here document. But it would tend to confuse a reader. ∴