It doesn't return anything, but that's my point.. even though the file doesn't exist mIRC doesn't raise an error.
/noop is a command that does nothing with the return value of the identifier. It's for identifiers that you don't need to do anything with the out, such as $findfile:
//noop $findfile($mircdir,*,0,echo -s $1-)
$ini() will work with text files too.