Control torrents from the command line

There are various BitTorrent clients that can be used in command-line mode. This approach can be very beneficial if you want to set up a dedicated machine for file sharing and then control it remotely via SSH or otherwise.

Linux has plenty of console-based torrent software to offer, including Ctorrent, Rtorrent and Transmission. Let’s see how the latter works. Transmission is known as one of the most popular graphical BitTorrent clients, but it often comes with packages such as transmission-cli and transmission-daemon designed for remote usage. The great power feature of the commandline version of Transmission is that you can daemonise it, i.e. you don’t need to stay connected to the host all the time the torrents are downloading. You can set it up once and have the daemon run in the background. If you have the .torrent file already, add it to the daemon this way: $ transmission-remote -n 'transmission:transmission' -a /path/to/your/file. torrent Start the daemon and enable it to

automatically manage the queue: $ sudo service transmission-daemon start List all torrents that are being downloaded and see the verbose statistics: $ transmission-remote -n 'transmission:transmission' -si

There’s also a dedicated utility for creating new torrents from scratch ( $ transmission

create -h ), editing torrents ( $ transmission-edit -h ) and even examining the torrent metadata to find out what exactly you will be downloading to your machine ( $ transmission-show -h ).