Using true instead of echo to debug bash scripts

TL;DR: When running scripts with bash -x, use true … instead of echo …, to avoid duplicate output

Sometimes we use echo to debug bash scripts, like this:

echo Beginning computation...
some_commands
result="$(something_else)"
echo "function returned $result"

Then, to aid debugging even more, we run the whole script with bash -x script.sh. This prints each line before it gets executed. As a result, you will see each echo line twice: once before it gets executed and once for echo output, like this:

+ echo Beginning computation...
Beginning computation...
+ some_commands
+ result="$(something_else)"
+ echo function returned twnty
function returned twnty

If you don't fancy seeing duplicate lines, you can just replace echo with true, like this:

true Beginning computation...
some_commands
result="$(something_else)"
true "function returned $result"

true accepts any number of arguments and simply ignores them. But bash -x script.sh output will look nicer:

+ true Beginning computation...
+ some_commands
+ result="$(something_else)"
+ true function returned twnty

Moreover, if you like separating different parts of your script with comment lines like this:

part_one
# ================
part_two

Then just replacing first comment character # with true will forward these lines to bash -x log:

$ cat sctipt.sh
part_one
true ================
part_two

$ bash -x sctipt.sh
+ part_one
+ true ================
+ part_two

Thanks Vratislav for this trick!