Richard Suchenwirth 2002-10-30 - A wish that comes up every now and then (see Persistent Tcl and Tk applications) is to dump the state of an interpreter to a file, so it can later be restored (by sourceing the resulting file) with the same settings. Here's a simple first shot that "serializes" global variables (scalar or array), interpreter aliases, and procedures, taking care to skip env and Tcl internals. Feel free to improve on this ;-)
As mentioned on comp.lang.tcl, this is not a complete state dump; just a reasonable facimile. Things like open file descriptors, sockets, etc. are particularly difficult to handle, as are various extension specific items.
Richard, what about namespaces and package requires?
AK: Note that tkcon contains dump routines as well, for namespaces too.
proc interp'dump {} { set res "# interpreter status dump\n" foreach i [lsort [info globals]] { if {$i == "env"} continue ;# don't dump environment.. if {[string match tcl_* $i]} continue ;# ..or Tcl system vars if {[array exists ::$i]} { append res [list array set $i [array get ::$i]]\n } else { append res [list set $i [set ::$i]]\n } } foreach proc [lsort [info procs]] { if {[string match auto_* $proc] || $proc == "unknown"} { continue ;# prevents most of the init.tcl procs from dumping } append res "proc [list $proc] {" set space "" foreach i [info args $proc] { if [info default $proc $i value] { append res "$space{$i [list $value]}" } else { append res "$space$i" } set space " " } append res "} {[info body $proc]}\n" } foreach alias [lsort [interp aliases {}]] { append res "interp alias {} $alias {} [interp alias {} $alias]\n" } set res }
#------------------------- Testing demo (pipe into file to save):
if {[file tail [info script]] == [file tail $argv0]} { #-- prepare some test cases: set scalar hello array set arry {foo 1 bar 2 grill 3} proc foo {bar} {puts grill-$bar} interp alias {} print {} puts stdout puts [interp'dump] }