NAME

dot — execute commands in current environment

SYNOPSIS

. file

DESCRIPTION

The shell shall execute commands from the file in the current environment. If file does not contain a slash, the shell shall use the search path specified by PATH to find the directory containing file. Unlike normal command search, however, the file searched for by the dot utility need not be executable. If no

readable file is found, a noninteractive shell shall abort; an interactive shell shall write a diagnostic message to standard error, but this condition shall not be considered a syntax error.

EXIT STATUS

Returns the value of the last command executed, or a zero exit status if no command is executed.

The following section is informative.

RATIONALE

Some older implementations searched the current directory for the file, even if the value of PATH disallowed it. This behavior was omitted from POSIX. 2 due to concerns about introducing the susceptibility to trojan horses that the user might be trying to avoid by leaving dot out of PATH. The KornShell version of dot takes optional arguments that are set to the positional parameters. This is a valid extension that allows a dot script to behave identically to a function. Example: cat foobar foo=hello bar=world . foobar echo $foo $bar hello world