Installing the less Pager on Your TiVo

Do more with less, the best way to page through and find things within a text file.

There’s an old Unix saying: “less is more.” It refers to two paging programs or commands, more and less, used to scroll through a text file a line or page at a time. While more is usually more than enough, less does all that more can and more—most notably, the ability to move and search not just forward, but also backward through a file. Indeed, less is more than more (Unix geeks just love this stuff!).

The Unix utilities package [Hack #34] doesn’t have any prepackaged pagers, so I recommend you install less. Grab yourself a copy of the precompiled version for TiVo from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tivoutils/less-378-s1.tar.gz?download. Don’t expand the archive; just transfer it [Hack #36] as is to the /var/hack directory on your TiVo and run the following commands to expand the archive, put less into place, and remove the unneeded archive: