Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module T209. This topic is presented on public courses
Learning to program in Tcl,
Tcl Basics
This module covers opening, reading and writing files in Tcl. You'll also learn how to check the contents of directories, test for the existence of individual files, and look up other information ranging from file size to file update time.
| Articles and tips on this subject | updated |
| 3617 | The fileutil package and a list of file system commands in Tcl
On top of the file commands, the ::fileutil package which is shipped with Tcl includes a range of commonly used structures ("design patterns") which means you don't have to keep wring your own composites. Here is a combined list, sorting them out by category rather than by which command or package they ... | 2012-02-18
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| 3429 | Searching through all the files in or below a directory - Ruby, Tcl, Perl
Many of our customers want to learn how to traverse all the files in a directory, or perhaps even all the files in or below a directory. I quite often write a demonstration program during our courses which looks though part of a file system tree for files over a certain size, or for the largest (so ... | 2011-09-09
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| 3320 | Reading the nth line from a file (Perl and Tcl examples)
"How do I find the 100th line in a file" - a common question for newcomers to coding. The short answer is to open the file, and loop through to read lines until the one that you want. Although most languages have a seek command or function, that works by bytes and with a typical text / ascii file, ... | 2011-06-09
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| 3192 | Tcl - Some example of HOW TO in handling data files and formats
During the Tcl course I was running earlier this week, we got involved in a number of interesting topics such as
• How to clean up input lines into lists of fields (use split)
• How to reformat awkward fields (use regexp and regsub)
• How to combine files that vary in format from year ... | 2011-03-04
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| 1407 | Reading from another process in Tcl (pipes and sockets)
If you want to read from another process on the same system that you're running your code on in Tcl can be done using a pipe - you can use open with the command name instead of the file name, preceeded by a pipe character (|) - thus:
set said [open |df r]
while {[gets $said this] >= 0} {
puts ... | 2011-03-01
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| 2467 | Tcl - catching an error before your program crashes
There are times when a Tcl command can fail because of the data being passed in to it ... and when it fails, it can do so with a spectacular crash! For example, the glob command which matches files to a pattern (Tcl's ls or dir if you like to think of it that way) can go 'belly up' if there are no files ... | 2009-10-22
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| 1467 | stdout v stderr (Tcl, Perl, Shell)
When you're programming, you shouldn't write code to read directly from the keyboard and write to the screen .... what if you want to have your program read from or write to a file sometimes? Instead, you should write code to read from stdin (Tcl) or STDIN (Perl) and write to stdout (Tcl) or STDOUT ... | 2007-12-12
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| 1426 | Buffering up in Tcl - the empty coke can comparison
A comment on buffering in Tcl ....
if {1 == 0} {
When you finish drinking a can of Coke, you don't call
your local recycling plant up straight away and have them
send a truck around to collect the empty - that would be
inefficient to put it mildly. And in the same way,
a computer doesn't always save ... | 2007-11-10
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| 779 | The fragility of pancakes - and better structures
Have you ever hunted around a directory for a file ... you KNOW it's there, but you can't find it - can't see the wood for the trees, if you like, in a listing that spills over many pages?
I call such directory structures "pancakes" as they're thin and flat, and they tend not to be very easy to work ... | 2006-06-30
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| 785 | Running external processes in Tcl and Tcl/Tk
If you want to run external processes from a Tcl based program (Tcl, Tcl/Tk, expect), there are various ways of doing it.
Firstly, the whole purpose of the Expect extension is to allow you to control other processes via its three major commands of spawn which starts another process, send which sends ... | 2006-06-30
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Examples from our training material
| bigbelow | Find biggest file in or below a specified folder |
| biggest | using glob to check all files in a directory |
| disc_status | Piping input from an operating system command |
| dnstab | Read a file, extract from it |
| failer | Using catch to trap file open failures |
| files | fileutil package in use |
| filework | Report file statuses |
| multifile | Output to stdout and several files at the same time |
| rail | Data extraction and reporting from multiple files |
| recent | List all files modified in the last hour |
Pictures
Tcl is a great Engineer's language
Background information
Some modules are
available for download as a sample of our material or under an
Open Training Notes License for free download from
http://www.training-notes.co.uk.
Topics covered in this module
Reading and writing files.
Opening a file - the basics.
Reading from a file.
Writing to a file.
Closing a file.
More about reading and writing files.
Other open access arguments.
An alternative to gets.
Other Input/Output commands.
Example.
File and directory handling.
The file command.
Looping through all the files in a directory.
Complete learning
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