I run across the question in the title when I take a break from the work today. Then I did a little bit googling, and the explanation is not quite satisfying to me. So, I decide to answer this question by a simplied example from my work.

For me, this question appears frequently when you try to install some software. Some software, like the product I'm working on, depends on a set of environment variables in order to setup itself properly. Usually, this may inovlve manual editing of the environment variables in order to make the product work. However, we can do much better. We can somehow let a setup program to edit the environment variable for the user and finish the whole product setup process automatically.

Suppose a software relies on an environment variable TEST_SOURCE and we don't have such an environment variable initially.

$ echo $TEST_SOURCE
$

If we create a test script test.sh like the following:

#!/bin/sh

export TEST_SOURCE=HELLO

Then we can have two way to execute this script: either by ./test.sh or by source test.sh and they two have different outcome:

$ ./test.sh
$ echo $TEST_SOURCE
$
$ source test.sh
$ echo $TEST_SOURCE
HELLO

So, the conclusion is that when we execute in source, we actually run program in the current shell. However, if we execute in ./, then we run the program in a separately shell and the execution (i.e. modify environment variable) doesn't impact our current shell.