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       This  manual  page  is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The Linux implementation of
       this interface may differ (consult the corresponding Linux  manual  page  for  details  of
       Linux behavior), or the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

NAME

       dot — execute commands in the 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
       non-interactive shell shall abort; an interactive shell shall write a  diagnostic  message
       to standard error, but this condition shall not be considered a syntax error.

OPTIONS

       None.

OPERANDS

       See the DESCRIPTION.

STDIN

       Not used.

INPUT FILES

       See the DESCRIPTION.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       See the DESCRIPTION.

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS

       Default.

STDOUT

       Not used.

STDERR

       The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

OUTPUT FILES

       None.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION

       None.

EXIT STATUS

       If  no readable file was found or if the commands in the file could not be parsed, and the
       shell is interactive (and therefore does not abort; see  Section  2.8.1,  Consequences  of
       Shell  Errors), the exit status shall be non-zero. Otherwise, return the value of the last
       command executed, or a zero exit status if no command is executed.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS

       Default.

       The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE

       None.

EXAMPLES

       cat foobar
       foo=hello bar=world
       . ./foobar
       echo $foo $bar
       hello world

RATIONALE

       Some older implementations searched the current directory for the file, even if the  value
       of  PATH  disallowed it. This behavior was omitted from this volume of POSIX.1‐2008 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.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

       None.

SEE ALSO

       Section 2.14, Special Built-In Utilities, return

COPYRIGHT

       Portions  of  this  text  are  reprinted  and  reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std
       1003.1, 2013 Edition, Standard for Information Technology  --  Portable  Operating  System
       Interface  (POSIX),  The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, Copyright (C) 2013 by the
       Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc  and  The  Open  Group.   (This  is
       POSIX.1-2008  with  the  2013  Technical  Corrigendum  1  applied.)  In  the  event of any
       discrepancy between this version and the original IEEE and The Open  Group  Standard,  the
       original  IEEE  and The Open Group Standard is the referee document. The original Standard
       can be obtained online at http://www.unix.org/online.html .

       Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most  likely  to  have
       been  introduced  during  the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report
       such errors, see https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .