Command Line Utilities

Command Line Utilities provide the necessary commands and programs that are missing by default on a stock TiVo. Without these utilities, it is extremely difficult to do anything when connected to a TiVo via telnet. More specifically, they provide a TiVo port of Busybox as well as a few TiVo-specific utilities.

Versions and Download

For Series 2 and Series 3 TiVos, there are two sources for Command Line Utiltiles:

• All In One Utilities from TiVoCommunity version has a very unrestrictive license and provides most everything a user might need. Because of the unrestrictive license, this is the recommended version.
• All-In-One S2 utilities collection from DealDatabase version has a much more restrictive license and it can not be distributed anywhere outside of the reference Dealdatabase post. The collection contains all of the same utilities available in the other distribution (most of which are use the GPL license) and also include some useful utilities written by the maintainer of that collection. If you need the additional utilities, consider using this version.

Installation of DealDatabase (AlphaWolf) Utilities

Download the file referenced in the first post of the thread referenced above. Use [http:7-zip.org 7-Zip] or equivalent to unzip the Tar file.

• [Telnet] into your TiVo and mount the root directory of TiVo as read-write

mount -o remount,rw /

• [FTP] the Tar file over to the root directory of the hacked Tivo.

• Using Telnet, change to the root directory and create the directory in which these files are to be stored:

mkdir /tivo-bin

• Move the .tar file to just FTPed to the TiVo into the into your directory.

mv tivotools.tar /tivo-bin

• Change into this new directory directory.

cd /tivo-bin

• Extract the .tar file via cpio. You might get a few messages that say "No such file or directory." This is fine, you can ignore this; it's just creating a symlink for a file that isn't there yet but will be there when the unpacking is completed.

cpio -i -H tar < tivotools.tar

• If it isn't already in there, use joe or another text editor to add the following line in either your rc.sysinit.author (or rc.sysinit) anywhere BEFORE you start bash or telnet deamon tnlited. You can also just add it anywhere in your /.profile if you are using bash --login.

export PATH=$PATH:/tivo-bin