What does . means?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have seen in some ksh script, that we are executing shell scripts inside other shell script as
. variable.sh

What is . here? Their is space between . and variabloe. And why we are not executing it like ./variable.sh? I know that . signifies current directory , but what its significance here?

Thanks in Advance

2

If you "source" a script with:

source /path/scriptname

or

. /path/scriptname

the script is running in the current shell instead of a child process (shell).

In this post the source command is explained by jim mcnamara:

http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/54347-bash-shell-exec-eval-source-looking-help-understand.html\#post302169844

3

Big Thanks Franklin, that was such a nice article by Jim... :b: