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Comment by Ives | Hacker News Reader

Or, at least when running Bash (possibly sh, didn't try), just

   >foo

also works to create file "foo".

That does not work, but

  :>foo

(the happy file creation operator) does.

What do you mean it doesn't work? ">file" will work on all POSIX shells, it even works on Solaris /bin/sh!

Also ":>" is not an operator, it's ":" (a built-in command that does nothing and returns true) and a redirection.

Like the grand-parent, I have definitely used a Unix variant (CX/SX?) which required a command to do redirection.

It was a joke to call it an operator.