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I recently switched from bash to zsh. In bash, I used the dot alias . for the source command, e.g.
. .bashrc
It worked with . .bashrc, . ~/.bashrc, . ./.bashrc.
However with zsh, the dot alias does not work in the same way. It only works with a path to the file. But not if I use a file without path:
This does not work:
. .zshrc
It would give me this error: .: no such file or directory: .zshrc
But these all work:
source .zshrc
. ./.zshrc
. ~/.zshrc
That's actually the standard behavior of the dot command: it uses a $PATH search, just like when running commands – not a regular relative path. So you can have your common libraries in e.g. ~/bin/ and simply load them with . libwhatever.sh from any directory.
Performing a direct relative path lookup is a nonstandard Bash extension.
(Similarly, dot . is actually the main command listed in the "shell language" standard, and source is a shell-specific alias – not the other way around.)
. ./.bashrc would source from the current directory. The manual doesn't offer any option to exactly match bash behavior – you would have to either use source or put the current directory in $path (which is a poor idea).
function .() { [[ ! -f "$1" && -f "./$1" ]] && builtin . "./$1" || builtin . $@ } -- this (untested) snippet does not however take arguments into account.
. returning non-zero status and causing an unwanted fallback to the second .. Really, && || does not work the same way as a ternary operator.)