Mastering Bash

The dot character (.)

The dot command is a shell builtin, and it has the same function of the source; when executed into the shell, it executes a file. And if it is used inside a script, it loads the referenced file content:

zarrelli:~$ comment.shbash: comment.sh: command not foundzarrelli:~$ . comment.sh* 1 2 3 comment.sh menu.sh test.txt# I am a comment but you can see me

As we can see from this example, the first try was not successful because comment.sh is not in the search path; but the second time, we were successful since the dot command executed the script. Now, let's see how to include some code from an external file into a script. Let's start writing the external file that we will source from the following code:

zarrelli:~$ cat ...