How to load a peer list file? According to this page,


  The client will automatically read a file named "addr.txt" in the
  bitcoin data directory and will add any addresses it finds in there as
  node addresses.


However, I can't find any point in the source code where this file is actually read, and I don't know how to verify all the peers known by my node.

Is the "addr.txt" file actually read by bitcoind? 
How can I check if the addresses are actually loaded?
This feature is no longer present in Bitcoin Core.  It was removed in 2011.

You can get the same effect by adding multiple addnode= lines to your bitcoin.conf.