Use of ./ in executing a script.

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi Guys,

Hope you are doing well out there.

Can you please let me know why do we use "./" to run a shell script?

Is it to run the script in the current shell or something else?

What if I have already defined a bang in the script say #!/bin/ksh and then running the script as ./myscript?

I would also like to know the difference in running a script as ./myscript and . /myscript(with white space).

Any help from you in understanding this would be highly appereciated.

Thanks,
Chandan

2

./ means you are specifying the path (location) of script.

it means the shell will execute the script from the current pwd.

Its same if you give complete path like /home/amit/myscript.sh
else if you are in the /home/amit/ -- then ./myscript.sh

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3

It executes a script that is in the current directory instead of where it belongs, which is in a directory in your $PATH.

The shebang tells the OS (or your shell) what interpreter to use to run the script.

./myscript is described above.

. /myscript will attempt to source (not execute) a script located in /, the root directory, where it should never be.

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