I run a lot of experiments in ipython, the results of which I pickle and save to disk. When I reload the results with pickle I end up with a dict whose keys are the variable names that I saved. It is tedious to have to reference these values through the dict, what I would really like is behavior like load in Matlab such that when I load the pickle file the variables are available in the global namespace.

I figured this was possible in Python but had no idea how to do this until I found this question on stack overflow that answers the question.

``` python Load pickle file variables into global namespace try: import cPickle as pickle except ImportError: import pickle

def loadvars(filename, namespace=None):
    if namespace is None:
        namespace = globals()

    with open(filename, 'r') as f:
        d = pickle.load(f)
        namespace.update(d)

```

If you try to put this code in a module and import the function then you will have to pass globals() to the function explicitly as the globals() in the function is not the IPython global namespace. However, you can put the above code inside your ~/.ipython/profile_PROFILE/startup/startup.ipy file and it will work as expected. PROFILE is the name of the profile that you plan to start IPython with.