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    the reason is that your script spawns a new shell process as a child of the current shell. Any environment changes you make in the child process cannot affect the parent. When you use . or source, you are not spawning a new child process, you are running the commands in the current shell. Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 20:32
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    @glennjackman I have a similar problem and I have tried your solution but it logs me off from shell when I do . or source. Why is this happening ? Commented Feb 21, 2012 at 13:03
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    @Patryk: maybe your script has an exit statement, so it is not suitable to be sourced. Commented Feb 21, 2012 at 13:24
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    While source ./script works completely fine, sudo source ./script.sh says sudo: source: command not found. How can I do this using sudo? Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 13:37
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    @71GA: depending on compilation preferences for sudo and depending on configuration settings in /etc/sudoers you can or cannot preserve your environment when running commands with sudo. I suggest you to try to source your script, and then run sudo with -E option to preserve the environment. If it does not work, I suppose there is very little you can do. Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 13:52