On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 05:58:59PM -0400, Neal P. Murphy wrote: > A semantic observation (probably unrelated to the aforementioned editing): > "... dot in ..." might be more clearly stated as "... source ( or '.') in > ..." because the action is to source the script into the current shell (thus > retaining the defined vars), as opposed to executing the script in another > shell or in a subshell (thus the var definitions are lost when the shell or > subshell exits).
I explicitly avoided the word "source" because it is a bash extension, and thus will not work in the POSIX sh that reads these files. If you could go back in time to ~1978 and put the "source" command into the Bourne shell, so that it would be a recognized command in all of the Bourne family shells today, then we wouldn't have this confusion.
