Hack 35 Poking Around

With a Bash prompt and some basic Unix utilities, let's get a lay of the land.

Before we really start mucking around, it's best to bring out that inner Boy Scout and whip out a map. Let's get a quick tour of the filesystem.

No matter how hard you look around, you're not going to bump into your recorded television programs as they are not stored in this Unix-able partition. Check out Chapter 6 to figure out how to get to them.

If you go to the top-level directory on the TiVo and list all the directories, you will find a superset of those listed here. The directories and their contents may vary from TiVo model to TiVo model, but these are almost certainly going to be there:

bin

Contains most commonly used Unix programs and commands: bash, cat, cp, cpio, du, grep, gzip, ln, mkdir, mount, mv, rm, rz, sz, umount, uname, etc. This can be supplemented by bringing additional Unix binaries onboard [Hack #31], [Hack #34].

dev

Contains special device interfaces for the hard disks and serial ports.

etc

Contains configuration files for the Linux side of TiVo. Files in this directory specify everything from which programs should be launched on power-up to the specifics of how the system logger should run.

lib

Holds the two libraries that all the compiled executable programs running on the TiVo are linked against, along with the kernel modules to be loaded as needed.

sbin

Contains programs needed by the Linux operating system, including pppd, restart, route, and rsh.

tmp

Contains temporary files.

tvbin

Home of the programs constituting the brains of TiVo—things like myworld, the actual TiVo program, and tivosh, a TiVo-specific shell under which the various maintenance scripts slave away in the background.

tvlib

Contains all the interesting data files used by the programs in tvbin. In tvlib, you'll find subdirectories like font—which contains true type fonts for everything on the screen—and data—which has a listing of all the actors and directors the TiVo puts up on the screen in its famousActors and famousDirectors files.