Well, it’s a fare long story.During the trainning, Aimee asked me a question about how the source command works under shell. Haven’t done a deep search at that time though it does not seem like a tough question. Now, i figure out how this stuff work, but the trainning is over and Aimee is gone.

It’s really simple for the function of source. It helps the current shell reload the variables from script file so that they could be recongnized.In another word–read and execute commands from the filename argument in the current shell context. Let’s just cut the crap and try some examples.

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touch test.sh
chmod +x test.sh
vi test.sh

And input the following content

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A = "shit happens"

We just define an variable named A in the script file. ok,let’s run this script with

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sh test.sh && echo $A

which will show nothing even shit because it creates a new subshell and the invariables created in the subshell will not show in the parent shell. Then you use

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source test.sh
echo $A

now you can see the shit by yourself.

So? What’s the difference between source and .?Well,basically, they are the same. Instead of using source, you can use . test.sh to get the same effect of using source even the file test.sh is not executable.It is said that use .test.sh means execute the hidden file, definetly not working on osx.