Torrent workflow in the shell.

Written by vidarlo on 20090516 in english and Linux and software and tutorials with 4 comments.

I use torrents for distributing various things, like Urospredere which I transcoded. When doing this, I realised I lacked the knowledge needed to create torrents from the terminal, and examine them. I therefor found some tools for it:

torrentinfo
Torrentinfo is a nice tool for querying an excisting torrent for information like size, trackers, and files contained in it. A must if you plan to copy the list of trackers…
mktorrent
mktorrent is a easy to use torrent creator. Specify list of trackers with -a, the chunk size (which defaults to 256kiB for some reason), and the files to be included in the torrent – and optionally the output file name of the torrrent.
rtorrent
rTorrent is a curses torrent client, which works fine for seeding and downloading torrents. It Just Works(TM).

That’s all you need to create and publish torrents without using a graphical torrent client like µTorrent or transmission 🙂

4 Responses to “Torrent workflow in the shell.

  1. You really need to try Deluge for leeching and seeding. A daemon. If you want a program, hrktorrent beats the hell out of rtorrent.

  2. Deluge seems to be graphical. I do not want that.

    And why does hrktorrent beat rtorrent? It’s not about warez here, it’s about seeding and distributing legal material… 😉

  3. Deluge is a torrent daemon. You can connect from a console, via web or with a Gtk UI. Your choice.

    It sure beats screening or leaving lots of terminals open.

    You have to get v1 or greater though; pre-v1 was just another GUI client.

    hrktorrent just feels better, UI, speed, everything. Does one thing and does it well. But there’s no need for hrktorrent now..

  4. Aha, sorry for not investingating deluge more thoroughly. I’ll have another look at it, ‘cos it sounds like an interesting solution.