No such file or directory .zshrc

Question

Recently, I realized I haven't been able to run

. .zshrc

in my home directory. It gives me the error above. It's really strange and it's bugging me out since it's worked perfectly fine in the past.

In the same directory, any of the below commands work fine

. ~/.zshrc
source .zshrc  

Output from echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n'

/Users/prashanthcr/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.0/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.0@global/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.2.0/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/.nvm/versions/node/v5.5.0/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools
/Users/prashanthcr/Library/Android/sdk/tools
/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
/opt/X11/bin
/usr/local/MacGPG2/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.0/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.0@global/bin
/Users/prashanthcr/.rvm/bin

Using zsh on OS X 11.11.3

Solution

zsh is working as expected (see man zshbuiltins):

• . File searches $PATH to find File unless there is a / in the name; while
• source is almost the same as ., except that it searches the working directory first.

I don't know how . .zshrc worked previously, unless there was a bug in an earlier release of zsh.

You can:

1. alias .=source;
2. link ~/.zshrc to a directory in $PATH;
3. add your home directory to $PATH (not recommended); or
4. live with having to type . ./.zshrc (this is what I always do in bash, where . and source are identical, and I want to be sure of the location of the script).

Comments

[Prashanth Chandra]

Thanks for the man reference. I guess I may have mixed it up with bash, which apparently does look in the current directory when POSIX mode is turned off (which seems to be the normal setting).

[AFH]

Thanks for the comment on bash: I hadn't realised . and source check the current directory, but after finding no match in $path, whereas source in zsh checks it first. I missed it because I tested with two files of the same name, one in the current directory, the other in $path.