https://RustRocket.rs -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE / MCT, https://Rustaceans.rs, Full Stack Cloud Native Rust DevOps Engineer - Rocket Framework Rust Microservices on Kubernetes-AWS-Azure-GCP

In a Unix shell, the full stop called the dot command (.) is a command that evaluates commands in a computer file in the current execution context. In the C shell, a similar functionality is provided as the source command, and this name is seen in "extended" POSIX shells as well.

The dot command is not to be confused with a dot file, which is a dot-prefixed hidden file or hidden directory. Nor is it to be confused with the ./scriptfile notation for running commands, which is simply a relative path pointing to the current directory (notated in Unix as a '.' character, and typically outside of the Path variable).