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You read the .toc file with the command \readtocfile.
Naturally, whatever \toc... entry commands that were written
to the file must be defined when \readtocfile is invoked. Eplain
has minimal definitions for \tocchapterentry,
\tocsectionentry, and \tocsubsectionentry, just to prevent
undefined control sequence errors in common cases. They aren't suitable
for anything but preliminary proofs.
Each of \writetocentry, \writenumberedtocentry and
\writenumberedtocline opens
the .toc file for writing, thereby deleting the information from the
previous run. You should therefore arrange that \readtocfile be
called before the first call to a \writetoc... macro.
\readtocfile does not itself delete the information
from the .toc file, so that you can call it several times,
e.g., to create both a short
and normal table of contents. (To produce this in particular, define
\tocsectionentry to produce nothing while you are reading
.toc file for a short table of contents (see Macro arguments).)
On the other hand, if you don't want to rewrite the .toc file at
all, perhaps because you are only running TeX on part of your
manuscript, you can set \rewritetocfilefalse.