openSUSE Tumbleweed has
test -s ~/.alias && . ~/.alias || true as the contents of its ~/.bashrc.
The way I understand the part to the left of || true is that
~/.alias exists and has a size greater than zero.So why is || true necessary?
GNU bash, version 5.0.16(1)-release (x86_64-suse-linux-gnu)
|| true is useful in contexts where we don’t care if the command fails; in this particular case, if ~/.alias doesn’t exist, test -s will fail with a non-zero exit code, but we don’t want that to have any other consequence. || true ensures that the full command list (including sourcing ~/.alias) always exits with a successful status.
This would be particularly relevant if the .bashrc included set -e, although that would be unusual for a shell startup script.
Another way to write this would be
if test -s ~/.alias; then . ~/.alias; fi but that would exit with a non-zero exit code if sourcing ~/.alias caused an error.
The || true ensures that the whole command returns a "Success" status, even if ./.aliases returns non-zero (Failure) status.
Handy if you're using set -e (exit on error).
