Tivo Hacks. 100 Industrial-strength Tips Tools 2003

Hack 54 wget Things from the Web

Bring the power of GNU wget , the ubiquitous file fetcher, to your TiVo .

http_get [Hack #53] is quite limited in what it can do. It's biggest limitation is that it can't talk to virtual hosts . As more and more web hosting shifts away from the one web server per IP address model, this can be an impediment.

The main reason that http_get can't talk to virtual hosted servers is because it can't do DNS resolution, relying instead on hard-coded IP addresses in the scripts that call it. In fact, the Linux installation running on the Series 1 TiVo doesn't have support for name resolution at all.

If you desperately must have a tool that can do name resolution for the Series 1, take a look at my wget.tcl (http://www.bitwaste.com/tivo/wget-tcl.tar.gz). The archive is packaged in a similar way. Just upload it to your TiVo, put it in /var , and extract it:

bash-2.02# gzip -d wget-tcl.tar.gz bash-2.02# cd / bash-2.02# cpio -i -H tar --make-directories < /var/wget-tcl.tar.gz bash-2.02# chmod 755 /var/hack/bin/wget.tcl

This script and its supporting libraries are built upon the DNS support in the Tcllib (http://tcllib. sourceforge .net), enabling it do DNS resolution completely in Tcl. If you point the script at hacks.oreilly.com as in the previous command, it'll download index.html as before.

My wget.tcl , as of yet, does not handle FTP-based URLs.