Comment 3 for bug 1325571

Bash Reference Manual
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Reference Documentation for Bash
Edition 4.2, for Bash Version 4.2. December 2010

Chet Ramey, Case Western Reserve University
Brian Fox, Free Software Foundation
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4 Shell Builtin Commands
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4.1 Bourne Shell Builtins

The following shell builtin commands are inherited from the
Bourne Shell. These commands are implemented as specified
by the posix standard.

: ( a colon)

                             : [ arguments ]

               Do nothing beyond expanding arguments and
               performing redirections.
               The return status is zero.

. ( a period)

                            . filename [ arguments ]

               Read and _execute_ commands from the filename
               argument in the current shell context.

               If filename doesnot contain a slash, the PATH variable
               is used to find filename.
               When Bash is not in posix mode, the current directory
               is searched filename is not found in $PATH.
               If any arguments are supplied, they become the
               positional parameters when file name is executed.
               Otherwise the positional parameters are unchanged.
               The return status is the exit status of the last command
               executed, or zero if no commands are executed.
               If file name is not found, or cannot be read, the return
               status is non-zero.
               This built in is equivalent to source.

***** *****
***** SINCE YOU DIDN'T TELL us readers what you *****
***** actually entered at the command line, we *****
***** can only presume. *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** Based on that bit of BASH that I gave, *****
***** *****
***** you should have typed in this: *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** . ./myscript *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** *****
***** The __ .__ is a command ! *****
***** That's right, just a period ! *****
***** A one character word meaning EXECUTE ! *****
***** *****
***** ( Note: if you are in the /bin directory, this *****
***** command is not needed. If you are not in a *****
***** bash shell enviorment, it is not functional. ) *****
***** *****

This is so . . .

. . . because back when UNIX was developed (1970),
a computer terminal was a teletype machine--a printer with
an attached keyboard. Back then the more characters used,
the longer the wait since printers were so slow.
Yes, paper was the "screen" !

When I went off to college in 1982, a state-of-the-art
DECwriterIII could do "180-character-per-second
bidirectional printing – for fast throughput."
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Bourne shell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bourne shell (sh) is a shell, or command-line interpreter,
for computer operating systems.

The Bourne shell was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7.
Most Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh—which
will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to
a compatible shell even when other shells are used by
most users.

Developed by Stephen Bourne at Bell Labs, it was a
replacement for the Thompson shell, whose executable file
had the same name—sh. It was released in 1977 in the
Version 7 Unix release distributed to colleges and universities.
Although it is used as an interactive command interpreter, it
was also intended as a scripting language and contains most
of the features that are commonly considered to produce
structured programs.

It gained popularity with the publication of
The UNIX Programming Environment by
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike—the first commercially
published book that presented the shell as a programming
language in a tutorial form.