That will break if there's comments in the file, or if any one of the variables' values contain spaces. You can use `set -a` to load .env into an existing shell instance instead:

    loadenv() {
        set -a
        source ./.env
        set +a
    }

Cool! This answers a question someone had in this thread.

... except I'm thinking this may `set +a` if the environment already had `set -a`, which maybe could cause problems? I wonder if it would make sense to record the existing status of "-a" (allexports) an set it / unset it as necessary.

You could do that, and it'd still be POSIX-shell comptible:

    loadenv() {
        case "$-" in
            *a*) source ./.env ;;
            *) set -a; source ./.env; set +a ;;
        esac
    }

Although I have yet to see a long shellscript utilise `set -a` globally :)

Very nice! Thanks for the suggestion. Seems more Unix-esque. Are there any important drawbacks of this version compared to the dedicated tool? (dotenv or dotenvx)

I can't believe I've never thought of doing this until now.