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When I was installing NVM through Homebrew, I found it. The backslash seems to be escaping the dot. Whey are they exactly doing before the shell script?

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
  [ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh" ] && \. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
  [ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm" ] && \. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm"  # This loads nvm bash_completion
Animal Farm
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    There is no ".\" in this code; only a "\.". The backslash escapes the following character. However, in this case it is unnecessary. because a lone period in the position of a command does not have any specific meaning. – user1934428 Dec 13 '21 at 11:09

1 Answers1

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Could be a line ending quirk, that interestingly does not change semantics. I.e. the original code could have been

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh" ] && \
. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm" ] && \
. "/opt/homebrew/opt/nvm/etc/bash_completion.d/nvm"  # Loads nvm bash_completion

and then the newlines got removed. Quoting the dot command wit \. has no effect other than suppressing alias-substitution. See also my answer to Why start a shell command with a backslash?

The code checks whether the files are non-empty and if so, sources them.

Jens
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