I had written a shell script that captured network values from a running set of K8s service nodes. The network values would change as I built and destroyed the cluster. I needed a handy way to update the env values of interest so I created a small shell script that fit the bill. The script captured the values correctly but never set the env values after I ran it. After some head scratching I discovered the Dot Space Script calling syntax. It’s shorter than typing source each time and super handy.

$ . ./path/to/set_my_env_vars.sh

Dot Space Dot calling syntax makes the script run under the current shell instead of starting another one (which is what happened when I ran ./set_my_env_vars.sh). The environment variables are now correctly set and available after the script exits - nice.