Simple Tivo mail sender

[cojonesdetoro]

----- New version 5/19/2004
added 'stdin' feature so it will work with pipes like this:

 ls -la /var/hack | mailfile stdin "These files are in /var/hack" joe@blow.com
 smartctl -H -i /dev/hda | mailfile stdin "smartctl status of /dev/hda " joe@blow.com

The only caveat is that you can't use a real file named 'stdin'. I'm spoiled by being able to do this in regular Linux. No need to bother with a temp file for some applications.


Note: This was modified from TivoMaster's version below so his changes are there as well.
--------------------------






This script is a stripped down version of Stuart Anderton's dailymail script. This script merely sends a specified text file as the body of the message to specificed recipient and with a specified subject. It's a very simple SMTP client with a little error checking. It could be improved to do more error checking.

The usage is like this:

mailfile.tcl /etc/rc.sysinit.author "Dude, check out all the noise my Tivo makes" joe@blow.com

A script like this might be handy:

#!/bin/sh
(
echo "--[ SMARTCTL ]--------------------"
smartctl -H -i /dev/hda
echo "--[ EXT2 FileSystem usage ]--------"
df -vh
echo "--[ /var/log/tverr ]------------------"
cat /var/log/tverr
) > /tmp/message.out
mailfile.tcl /tmp/message.out "Tivo Critical Info" joe@blow.com


Props to Stuart for showing us how.

[tivomaster]

Cool, This will work GREAT with the smartd daemon which I am trying to get scripted. With this I can have it monitor the drives and email me if it is failing. I already have it generating tivo messages....

[cojonesdetoro]

I've already started stripping down the dailymail app so I can print conflicts, todos, uptime, phone status and smartctl to stdout or a file.

I run a little bash script to populate the txt file in the order I wish and then mail it off. I also stripped out all the HTML so I can place the file as a Tivo message and have it be more readable. I find it handy to be able to get the information in dailymail as separate modules that I can choose ala carte in any order I wish. Stuart did all the brain work but I'm having fun hacking up his code to suit my needs.

BTW: I won't post the other stuff because it's ugly and may not work on other Tivos besides a HDR312SA1 in the Eastern Time Zone. If anyone asks I'll send it as a mail attachment but It should be easy enough for anyone to hack dailymail themselves once they take a look at it. It's a pretty easy read even though there's not a lot of comments.

[sanderton]

There's been WAY more interest in DailyMail than I expected - the original was a very Q&D hack for my own use I just posted for the hell of it.

Over on TC folks have now got it with in-line graphics, checking their HD health, drawing space free graphs, making the tea etc.

But the whole thing is balanced on some horribly rough code.

I've been considering re-writing it TivoWeb style; ie a core program to send mail with drop-in modules for the info that people might want to send, using some kind of standardised interface.

So many hacks, so little time...

BTW: You're just dumping the file contents to the mail server; 9 times out of 10 that will work, but most mail servers will only cope with a fairly limited number of characters per line, so you'll need to be sure that the file you send does not have any long paras. The descriptions of some shows were too long to send as one line, for example. That's why DailyMail has a silly-looking bit of code to cut up the text into words and send them one at a time!

[cojonesdetoro]

Originally Posted by sanderton

BTW: You're just dumping the file contents to the mail server; 9 times out of 10 that will work, but most mail servers will only cope with a fairly limited number of characters per line, so you'll need to be sure that the file you send does not have any long paras. The descriptions of some shows were too long to send as one line, for example. That's why DailyMail has a silly-looking bit of code to cut up the text into words and send them one at a time!

undefined
Ahh.. I was wondering why all the nested foreach statements where there. I'll look into it.... how about the 'fmt' binary?

Tivo1# fmt --help
Usage: fmt [-DIGITS] [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Reformat each paragraph in the FILE(s), writing to standard output.
If no FILE or if FILE is `-', read standard input.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
-c, --crown-margin preserve indentation of first two lines
-p, --prefix=STRING combine only lines having STRING as prefix
-s, --split-only split long lines, but do not refill
-t, --tagged-paragraph indentation of first line different from second
-u, --uniform-spacing one space between words, two after sentences
-w, --width=NUMBER maximum line width (default of 75 columns)
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit

In -wNUMBER, the letter `w' may be omitted.

Report bugs to textutils-bugs@gnu.ai.mit.edu


I could change this line:

puts $chan [exec cat $file ]


to this:

puts $chan [exec cat $file | fmt ]


It seems to work. I can rewrite it to use the fmt tivo hack binary and include the binary in the zip file. I can then include parameters supported by fmt as settings at the top of the script. I guess I should write tcl code that will do it but I'm not very good with tcl.


EDIT: Now that I think of it, I'll leave it up to the user to properly format the file. It's better to leave it as a small widget that does what it does, that is, send a file. Anyone who needs it can use the fmt binary on their own.

[tivomaster]

CojonesDeToro,

I updated mailfile a little. You can now specify to send to either an email addy, the TiVo message que or the Pre-TiVo messag que. I also made it so that if you wanted just to send a string you could without having to copy it to a file and send the file. This is good for quick warning etc messages.

Here are the new options/runstring.
----------------
mailfile.tcl

A simple TCL script for Tivo that will mail a file or text
as the body of the message to a specified recipient or the
Tivo message center

usage: mailfile.tcl <file path/text-to-send> <subject> <recpient>
where: <file path> is the text file that would be the body of the message
<text-to-send> is the text to send (use quotes for more than one word)
<subject> is the mail subject (use quotes for more than one word)
<recipeint> is a single mail recipient like joe@blow.com
or tivo to send to TiVo message que
or pretivo to send to PreTiVo message que
sample usage:
mailfile.tcl /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit "rc.sysinit file from tivo" joe@blow.com
mailfile.tcl "text to send" "text message from tivo" joe@blow.com
mailfile.tcl "text to send" "text message from tivo" tivo
mailfile.tcl "text to send" "text message from tivo" pretivo

Note: be sure to edit the script for setting mail server and domain

[cojonesdetoro]

Originally Posted by tivomaster

I updated mailfile a little. You can now specify to send to either an email addy, the TiVo message que or the Pre-TiVo messag que. I also made it so that if you wanted just to send a string you could without having to copy it to a file and send the file. This is good for quick warning etc messages.

Nice changes! I would just send /dev/null when I only wanted a warning message as the subject but the direct-to-tivo-messages is a great option.

[tivomaster]

Originally Posted by cojonesdetoro

Nice changes! I would just send /dev/null when I only wanted a warning message as the subject but the direct-to-tivo-messages is a great option.

/dev/null...
Didn't think about that...
Oh well, this will at least let you put a little more detailed description the the body as text...

[cojonesdetoro]

added 'stdin' feature so it will work with pipes.

see top post.

[ds2ktj]

I submited a message to pretivo and now it comes up after the system has been in stanby. How long does it take for these to go away and is there any way to manually remove that message?

[cojonesdetoro]

pretivo messages wil pop up in your face when you press the Tivo key but that should only happen once. After that the message will expire in two weeks and go away.

Also look here:

http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/sh...tcl#post190546

This script only deletes regular tivo messages bu you can modify this string:

"/MessageItem/MessageBoard"

To delete Pretivo messages. I don't know the exact string but you can find it by looking at the source code of this script.

[kelsky]

I was trying out the mailfile.tcl on my series 2 - version 6.2 and I am having problems with the following line:

# event send $TmkEvent::EVT_DATA_CHANGED 12 0

As you can see I commented it out and it works fine when sending a message to the tivo unit.

Is this line important? What would be the equivalent line for a series 2 ver 6.2?

[cojonesdetoro]

Originally Posted by kelsky

# event send $TmkEvent::EVT_DATA_CHANGED 12 0

In all honesty, I'm not sure. :-/

I have seen this in other code that redraws the on screen menus to reflect changed information so it probably instructs the Tivo to refresh the list of mail messages. Without it your new mail message may not show up immediately.