Question

I found following few lines of code in .bashrc in my linux instance. could sombody explain me what does this line of codes means. i have no background in shell programming.

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
        . ~/.bashrc
fi

thanks in advance for any help

Answer 1

[ -f ~/.bashrc] tests wheather a file .bashrc exists in the current home directory. If it exists, then it’s sourced.

That means it is executed in the current shell, not by starting a new shell. So all changes in the script affect the current shell directly without having to export variables.