Tvheadend

I have had a devil of a time getting tvheadend to properly recognize and use the grabber that is best for my location, tv_grab_file, a bash script which simply cats an xmltv file to the program which calls it. It has worded a few times, but most often has not. The current version of TVHE (2.12) does not usually recognize it as a grabber. Yes, I have it in /usr/bin, and it does have the appropriate permissions. Would it not be possible to allow for a direct upload of an xmltv file to TVheadend?