GENESIS offers several routines to read or write data from within the GENESIS environment to an operating system file, or to prompt the user for information.
| Routine | Description |
| asciidata | Converts a FMT1 formatted binary file to ASCII. |
| closefile | Closes an ASCII file opened with the openfile command. |
| eof | Tests whether at end of currently opened file. |
| flushfile | Flushes buffered data to disk to insure that it gets written. |
| input | Obtains input from the user at the GENESIS prompt. |
| listfiles | Lists ASCII files currently opened by openfiles command. |
| logfile | Activates and deactivates logging of all commands issued in |
| a GENESIS session. | |
| notes | Allows user to enter text notes into a file. |
| openfile | Opens ASCII file for reading or writing. |
| readfile | Reads a line of data from an opened ASCII file. |
| where | Returns name of operating-system directory in which specified |
| file is located. | |
| writefile | Writes out ASCII data to currently opened file. |
The simdump command and its auxillary commands are used to dump an entire simulation to a GENESIS script file, complete with the current values of specified element fields. This file may then be loaded into GENESIS to recreate the simulation. This is in contrast to the save and restore commands, which are used for specified (or wildcarded) elements in a simulation.
| Routine | Description |
| enddump | Cleans up at the end of a dumpfile |
| initdump | Initializes the simulation dumping/undumping system |
| msgsubstitute | Allows undump of saved simulation with new message names |
| objsubstitute | Allows undump of saved simulation with new object names |
| restore | Restores element state stored in file with save routine |
| save | Saves current field values for specified element in a file |
| simdump | Dumps an entire simulation to a GENESIS script file |
| simobjdump | Sets up format for dumping/reading objects to a file |
| simundump | Creates an element and assigns values to its fields |
| substituteinfo | Lists substitutions from msgsubstitute/objsubstitute |
| swapdump | Mirrors initialization data when doing simulation dumps |
Often, one would like to write or read data at regular intervals, using one of the available simulation clocks. The GENESIS objects asc_file , disk_out , and disk_in may be used for this purpose. The diskio , variable , and metadata objects provide the features of the existing disk_in and disk_out objects to read and write data in the portable binary NETCDF format. This eases the interfacing of GENESIS simulations with popular analysis and signal-processing tools such as MATLAB, and makes it possible to use binary files produced by GENESIS on multiple platforms. For examples of ``clocked file I/O'', see the documentation for these objects in the GENESIS Object Reference.
The event_tofile and spikehistory objects are useful for recording spike event times to a file.