restarting bash

There came a situation wherein I had updated the bashrc file and wanted to apply the effects to current shell without restarting it. Then I ended on the "source" command. On Mac, I had to type

source /etc/bashrc

while in linux its

source .bashrc

. It ended up applying the configuration to the current shell. Similarly, for applying profile specific datas (more like the autoexec.bat file in mac), I had to modify /etc/profile file for setting up PATH and other enrivonmental variables.