The unknown Command Automatic loading of Tcl commands is implemented by the unknown command. Whenever the Tcl interpreter encounters a command that it does not know about, it calls the unknown command with the name of the missing command. The unknown command is implemented in Tcl, so you are free to provide your own mechanism to handle unknown commands. This chapter describes the behavior of the default implementation of unknown, which can be found in the init.tcl file in the Tcl library. The location of the library is returned by the info library command. How Auto Loading Works The unknown command uses an array named auto_index. One element of the array is defined for each procedure that can be automatically loaded. The auto_index array is initialized by the package mechanism or by tclIndex files. The value of an auto_index element is a command that defines the procedure. Typical commands are: source [file join $dir bind_ui.tcl] load [file join $dir mime.so] Mime The $dir gets substituted with the name of the directory that contains the library file, so the result is a source or load command that defines the missing Tcl command. The substitution is done with eval, so you could initialize auto_index with any commands at all. Example 12-2 is a simplified version of the code that reads the tclIndex file. Example 12-2 Loading a tclIndex file. # This is a simplified part of the auto_load_index procedure. # Go through auto_path from back to front. set i [expr [llength $auto_path]-1] for {} {$i >= 0} {incr i -1} { set dir [lindex $auto_path $i] if [catch {open [file join $dir tclIndex]} f] { # No index continue } # eval the file as a script. Because eval is # used instead of source, an extra round of # substitutions is performed and $dir gets expanded # The real code checks for errors here. eval [read $f] close $f } Disabling the Library Facility: auto_noload If you do not want the unknown procedure to try and load procedures, you can set the auto_noload variable to disable the mechanism: set auto_noload anything Auto loading is quite fast. I use it regularly on applications both large and small. A large application will start faster if you only need to load the code necessary to start it up. As you access more features of your application, the code will load automatically. Even a small application benefits from auto loading because it encourages you to keep commonly used code in procedure libraries. | 
