http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=531486


in reply to Re: using .profile in perl
in thread using .profile in perl

I'm pretty sure the leftmost "dot" is intentional as the author seems familiar with Unix shell scripting and probably wants to make use of the "dot command" to execute the specified script in the current shell. Without it, the second script runs in a subshell... even though the script may set environment variables, they all go away when the the script ends and the subshell terminates.