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Reading Objects from a Channel

Before discussing the format of the output produced above (§15.3), let us consider how to read it back, so as to reconstruct the original ObjectObject. Naturally, we would first need to save the output in a file. We can do that either by using the SinkFileSinkFile attribute, or (on UNIX systems), by redirecting standard output to a file using a shell command like:

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Within a subsequent program, we can read this Object back in by using the astReadastRead function, having first created a suitable ChannelChannel:

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By default, this function will read from the standard input stream (the default source for a basic Channel), so we would need to ensure that our second program reads its input from the file in which the Object description is stored. On UNIX systems, we could again use a shell redirection command such as:

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Alternatively, we could have assigned a value to the SinkFile attribute before invoking astRead.