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Hah, yeah I was completely wrong on that! Should have fact checked myself. That's a falsehood I absorbed at some point and didn't question.

Well there's a blog post idea for you, sounds primed for the front page already - Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Colons...

: is the prefix for labels in DOS batch files.

No need to ask for a source. The word "label" in the POSIX shell documentation only occurs in the description of `case`, and it doesn't happen in the manual page for bash, dash, zsh, etc.

Equally surprised. I know ':' is a label in sed, but labels in (ba)sh, I'm not aware. If it's indeed a label, is there a goto?