I’m a huge rtorrent fan. I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything else, unless there’s something funky the big-name programs can do, that rtorrent just doesn’t handle yet.
This time, instead of introducing you to rtorrent nice and easy, like I did with cplay, I’m going to give you a brief tour, and then I’ll show you something very cool you can do with it. rtorrent is an amazing, complex, powerful program that is at the same time sleek, clean, comprehensive and ultralight — and I’m giving you just one small idea of its potential.
But first, let’s scratch the surface. Like a lot of console-driven programs, the startup screen for rtorrent is … rather dry.
That’s all you get. Exciting, isn’t it? 
To add a torrent, press return and navigate to the torrent file. In this example, I’m using the latest HYPE album, “Just a Catwalk from Heaven,” from Jamendo. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, but it’s a free and legal download and it makes for a good example.
You can use tab completion to make your way to it. Double-tab shows a list of available path options that match the path you’ve already started. Your path starts in your home directory (unless you started it in a lower directory than that), so you don’t have to give it the full root path if you don’t want to. Press enter when you’ve found the one you want, and rtorrent will add it to the list.
Note that it’s still labeled as “INACTIVE.” rtorrent won’t start downloading until you tell it to. Use the arrow up and down keys to highlight the torrent (it will be marked with a bar of asterisks) and press CTRL+S.
Now we’re moving. The torrent is marked as active, the tracker will be contacted, and provided there are adequate seeds, downloading will start.
That’s about it, in a nutshell. There are some customary points that you’d expect from a torrent client. Press the right arrow while a torrent is highlighted, to see a detailed breakdown of the information available.
To get back to the main list, use the left arrow. Bandwidth throttling might be important to you too. If you’re used to capping your bandwidth (I choke my upload speeds to keep my wireless router from having a nervous breakdown), try using the a-s-d, A-S-D, z-x-c and Z-X-C keys to trim the speed to your liking.
If you take a few moments to experiment, you’ll find that pressing the numbers 1-6 gives you a revised view, with different filters applied. That can be useful if you’ve got 10 or 12 torrents running at a time, and you want a clear list of finished torrents, or stopped torrents. And most important, you can quit the program with CTRL+Q.
This is where you can stop if you just wanted the short tour. The next part is for people who really want to put rtorrent to work, and don’t mind getting their hands dirty. 
When you started rtorrent for the very first time, you probably saw a warning message that told you there wasn’t a .rtorrent.rc file to follow. That configuration file is what morphs rtorrent from a mild-mannered, law-abiding console gimmick into an unholy torrent-wrangling banshee.
In Ubuntu, the sample rtorrent configuration file is hiding at /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc. Copy one for your own perusal, and give it the proper hidden file prefix.
cp /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/examples/rtorrent.rc ~/.rtorrent.rc
Now open that file in your favorite text editor. Take a minute or two to peruse the guts. (I’ve copied one to the Ubuntu-nl pastebin for reference, or if you’re reading this at work on your $3,000 DRM-crippled Vista rig. 
)
You should get an idea of what the file can do; setting max uploads and downloads, default throttling and IP masking are all options. But take a closer look at some of these settings.
# Watch a directory for new torrents, and stop those that have been
# deleted.
#schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent
#schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=
What’s that mean, you say? Well, it means rtorrent can watch a directory and add torrents to its list automatically, and stop torrents if the corresponding file disappears. Now look at this:
# Stop torrents when reaching upload ratio in percent,
# when also reaching total upload in bytes, or when
# reaching final upload ratio in percent.
# example: stop at ratio 2.0 with at least 200 MB uploaded, or else ratio 20.0
#schedule = ratio,60,60,stop_on_ratio=200,200M,2000
You can also allow seeding to a specific ratio, a specific total uploaded or both. So if you get tired of carrying the weight of the Internets on your shoulders, you can limit your sharing on any number of criteria.
That’s nothing new, you might say. Azureus does all that, plus it has a feature-rich GUI, is proof of the viability of Java applications and has a cool blue frog as a mascot.
Well, please allow me to retort … with a case study: Imagine you’ve got two machines: Your $3,000 dual-core, dual SATA-drive, LED-bespeckled laptop straight from Dell, with an array of glossy sheen snap covers, eight USB ports, a gigabit connection and a built-in 802.11a-wireless card.
Your other machine is the lowly 166Mhz Pentium laptop. The one with 64Mb of PC66 and a 3Gb hard drive. The one you got from work in 1997 and never took back, even when you left them for another company during the dot-com boom. Burnt-out pixels, loose hinges and one scratchy speaker. The one with the Stone Temple Pilots sticker peeling off the lid. You know what I’m talking about. 
Set up your main rig with a shared network folder (NFS would be perfect for this) on a static IP address. Set up your lowly Pentium machine with a hard line to your router, maybe with a PCMCIA LAN card — something that at least gives you decent access speeds.
Now mount that shared folder directly into your slave’s home directory, maybe under ./watch. Set up the configuration file. Trigger rtorrent on bootup, and tell it to watch that folder.
Now you surf away in the comfort of your shiny dual-core desktop-replacement laptop, and when you find a torrent you like, save it into the local networked folder — perhaps even sending it to that folder automatically, through Firefox’s file extension preferences.
When you save it, rtorrent snaps it up and adds it to its list. It starts downloading it automatically, saving the file locally or perhaps on an external drive. You can set it to follow a certain bandwidth schedule so it doesn’t overwhelm the network, or you could hold all the torrents until the middle of the night, and do all your downloading during the wee hours.
It continues to download until it’s finished, then seeds for as long as you allow it. If it reaches the seeding ratio you set, it stops. If it reaches the upload limit, it stops. And best of all, if you delete the control torrent file out of your local download directory, it halts all the activity on that torrent and subtracts it from the list. Download the torrent, and it starts immediately. Change your mind and delete it, and rtorrent cuts it loose. Clean and neat, all handled automatically and without the least amount of effort on your part. It’s almost like a torrent daemon.
(In my experience, rtorrent never deletes the product files it has already created. So if you start downloading and change your mind an hour later, rtorrent might take the torrent out of the list, but the target files are still available. Conceivably, you could change your mind again and re-download the torrent file, and rtorrent would pick up the already downloaded fraction and get back to work on it. But I’m not 100 percent sure on that because I don’t recall ever doing it, so don’t hold me to that. 
)
I’ll be honest and say I haven’t used Azureus in more than a year, and so it’s possible that you could create the same arrangement with Azureus. But can Azureus run on your leftover Pentium Pro laptop?
rtorrent is highlighted in that htop window. CPU usage is 1.3 percent of my 1Ghz and the memory profile is 1 percent of my 512Mb, and that’s while it seeds the HYPE album I started downloading when I started writing this. Add a few more torrents and of course the profile will go up, but the benefit of running without Java, without the X interface and without two dozen Gnome dependencies should be blatantly obvious. I’m willing to bet your old Pentium could do it.
Spacewise, rtorrent is going to cost you 314Kb for the download and 860Kb to install. libtorrent9 is necessary, so that’s another 284Kb to download and 788Kb on your drive, so you’re looking at less than 600Kb of bandwidth and maybe 1.6Mb installed. Again, I’ve written letters to Mom that took up more space than that.
I hope this is convincing enough to get you to try rtorrent, and maybe even use it on a regular basis. I really believe it’s a better option than most of the prevailing torrent clients, even if it is console-based. If you want to delve even deeper into this amazing little program, take a spin past the rtorrent wiki, which is one of the best-composed and best-written I’ve seen in a long time. The project is very active, and it has the look of it.
Next time: Give up on the Gecko, and browse with elinks instead.
Edit, 2008-02-14: dodger has been kind enough to translate this howto into Spanish; it’s on his blog here. Please remember that my blog is GFDL 1.2, which means you’re free to use or translate this post as you like, so long as you redistribute the content with the same license, or a later version. For more details, see my About page.
Thanks for this rtorrent mini-howto. I’ve played with it a little bit, but I think it’s almost time to really put it to work. Jamendo, here I come!!!
Well I use the same scheme in my house. An old 366MHz K6 with 192MB RAM for torrents and file server.
I use tightvnc and open azureus. I have a load average of 2 and so when copying from NFS the speed is small (4-5 MB/sec). Now I have tested ktorrent but while it´s much lighter it crashes every half day!
I ‘ll give it a try, but I was wondering can you change on the fly the upload/download speed per torrent like you can in azureus?
Thanks, great guide! Really well put across. I looked at rtorrent briefly recently but didn’t see any of the more advanced features you talk about!
I’ll most certainly be giving it another look now
Does work rtorrent with a socks proxy?
@Harris: I believe so. Try highlighting the torrent you want to throttle, then press the right arrow to get the detailed information screen. I believe there are individual torrent speed controls available from there.
@alex: I’m not completely sure. I run it on a home network and don’t have enough experience with socks proxies to answer confidently. Perhaps someone else who has worked with them can chime in.
Heres a great link for all torrent freaks out there:
http://www.scrapetorrent.com
Its like THE Google of Torrent searches. I’ve always found it very reliable. I’ll be making a few posts about it in the near future so drop by and check it out.
Cheers
don’t miss this ubercool tip:
screen rtorrent
…and whats so exiting?
press Ctrl-a d and it will detach, and log out (leave de machine on!) and come back later,
screen -r
and will resume your session.
PS:man screen and will get a lot of Ctrl-a functions!
Sounds great, but a stripped down version that can run on DD-WRT or OpenWRT would be better don’t you think? A bit more power than your pentium pro and can’t get closer to the router than that
Unfortunately it would need to be stripped a bit for the most commmon routers (which only have 8 megs of Flash 6.5 of which are filled with either of the above OS’).
But how to stop torrent automatically when it has 100% downloaded?
OK started using it. Very nice, fast and (still) stable.
Though in some torrents from a certain tracker I get:
Tracker: [Could not parse bencoded data]
The same thing happens with bittorrnado, but not with azureus and utorrent. Any help?
Archonon: “But how to stop torrent automatically when it has 100% downloaded?”
You don’t, you effing leech.
rtorrent is a nice lightweight torrent client. The only feature I miss is DHT.
also i suggest to use torrenTools, is a browser toolbar for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer; allows to search 41 specialized torrent search sites for needed files (2torrents, bitenova, bitoogle, bittorrent, bittorrentshare, bt.etree, btbot, btjunkie, btwarehouse, bushtorrent, demonoid, extratorrent, fenopy, flextorrents, fulldls, google, isohunt, jabberwalker, letwory, litebay, meganova, mininova, monova, mybittorrent, newtorrents, nova9, orbdesign, smaragdtorrent, snarf-it, thepiratebay, torrentat, torrentbox, torrentfinder, torrentportal, torrentreactor, torrentspy, torrenttyphoon, torrentvalley, torrentz, worldnova, yotoshi).
Extra feature: torrent newsfeed, links to 30 torrent’s sites, links to 12 torrent’s group of discussion, links to 12 torrent’s forum.
http://torrentools.communitytoolbars.com/
I’ve always been pissed with how Azureus takes up so much memory and is so unstable, rTorrent serves my purposes almost perfectly well. The only thing I’m missing is being able to select which files to download within a torrent. Or maybe it’s there and I’m missing it. Any thoughts?
Thanks for the info, that is great!
-Matt
http://www.mattgunn.ca
Nevermind, figured it out! Go to the file list, hit space on the file you want to not download. hit space again to tell it it’s priority. I’ve definitely found my new favourite torrent client, just uninstalled azureus!
I love rtorrent and I use it in an old PC running Debian Etch.
For those of you looking for a GUI client my bet is for Ktorrent.
DONT KNOW YET. MAY HAVE TO GIVE THIS TORRENT DEAL A SHOT ALWAYS USED B.S. OR L.W. SHAREEZA TYPE. AM SURE WILL BE BACK HERE SNIVELING IF I CANT FIGURE IT OUT THX GUYS ; MICHELLE2U
I’ve written a nice small shell script that adds a download queue facility to rTorrent. So that I don’t have to see once it a torrent finishes downloading. It works like charm.
thanks for that article. bookmarked it. i love rtorrent, mostly because my machine is very old and darn slow.
Good work
I love rtorrent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently support per torrent limits. Here’s the open ticket: http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ticket/118
By the way, rtorrent also works great on a linksys nslu2 with deb etch … (a 10 watt full linux mini box; compare that to a 200+ watt vista energyguzzler)
[nslu2: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2
woww…. thanks for the great tutorial.
now, I’m using rtorrent
May I link this article into my blog?
Thanks again
Although it’s far from perfect, Azureus lets you run
safepeer, which is probably a good idea…
Great article!
One question
Can I select which files from torrent will be downloaded?
Gee, that only took 5 minutes.
Thanks so much for the excellent tutorial.
I now have rtorrent running on my Debian Slug (nslu2) with an attached USB hard drive. It only draws about 30w of power and serves the downloaded files to any pc on our network.
This is my first ever experience doing anything with Linux other than installing Ubuntu from a live CD once. I may become a Linux convert based on my experience with the NSLU2, Debian and rtorrent.
I’m missing one thing with rTorrent (and almost every other torrent client out there). To be able chose a specific path for each of the files in the torrent.
If you download an album named “abc” rTorrent will automatically save it to /my/path/abc/ but I want to save it to /my/path/abc_2003/
Anyone has any ideas how to get it working? Because if I can do that rTorrent has everything I need.
I’ve been using cli Azureus for a couple of years. It does have dht and per torrent throttling which are for me must have features. But rtorrent is designed as a cli and is more informative so I’ve been thinking about using it for awhile.
As you know, Az uses only one port while rtorrent defaults to 6890-6999. Can rtorrent be made to use one port? If not, how do you decide the right number? Why is 10 better than 9 or 11?
How do you add additional trackers in rtorrent??
To download only selected files from within a torrent:
- select the torrent on the main screen then right arrow,
- down arrow to ‘file list’ option, then right arrow
- select each file and toggle the priority with asterisk key (*) -> ‘off’,'hig’ (high),” (normal)
- set the files you don’t want to be ‘off’
Thanks 4 the info. I’ve search it for a long day ago.
n i found it here. Thx a lot…
Great article, thank you very very much!
Finally getting rid of Azureus. Running Azureus remote with ssh -X was a pain in the *ss
ssh+screen+rtorrent rocks !
If you like exists a python program called rtorstat that creates a web page HTML with the statys of all torrents managed by rtorrent.
I modified it so that it is not needed bittorrent installation anymore, I can send to blog if you tell me how to attach it.
regards
blu. eagle
Echoing christooss’s question.
Can you select the files within a torrent that you don’t wnant to download?
If I download a discography torrent, can I prevent is downloading some of the tracks?
rtorrent is slick!
but BUT it will not move torrents on completion
this is a major problem for my work-flow or should i say play-flow
(this is true as of v05.3 24/07/2007)
how can i find a list of commands and options for this application? how can i find the man page?
Like I mentioned before. I’ve written a shell script that adds a queue facility to rTrorrent. For example. I can have rTorrent download at most 3 torrents at any point, the rest of the torrents are queued. Once a torrent finishes downloading, it moves the downloaded files to some other directory so that it doesn’t seed this torrent!
I’d be interested in this shell script, Adam - can I get a link?
Hi there,
I have a weird problem with rtorrent. The throttle is off (or set to 300/40). I’m connected to internet with a 3 Mbps connection so I get download transfers up to 360 KB per second. Unfortunately in rtorrent (and only there) I cannot get a download rate faster than 60 KB/s. The download speed is always balancing between 55 and 59.5 KB/s.
It’s very annoying. I thought about the throttle so I set it to 300/40 KB/s and nothing changed. Then I thought about the default config, so I have copied it from /usr/… and nothing changed.
Rtorrent runs on my second computer (Ubuntu 7.04). Both computers are connected to the internet by a D-Link DI-524 Router, but I haven’t been downloading anything on the first computer while testing rtorrent on the second one.
Please, help my in any way. Give me a hint or something. I like rtorrent and I wan’t to keep it, but I cannot live on those speeds. For the same reason, I have uninstalled torrentflux earlier (also problems with download rate). But, for example Azureus speeds very nice.
Thanks for any help.
Best regards,
Nikodem Osmialowski
where’s that script your talking about Adem?
please share
Great stuff.
I never realized rtorrent was so capable, although it’s the only client I’ve used (after the initial checking out) so far.
Thanks for the tips, though, and might I add, that comparison of Azureus vs. rtorrent , well, was like telling my story about my problems
. Only that my downloader box is p2 -233(a turbo button boosts its speed too) . hah (better than p1 - 166 huh?)
Thanks a ton.
Erm.. does anyone know how to use an ipfilter in rTorrent?
Use MoBlock as an ipfilter. It’s just as good as PeerGuardian or Safepeer, but requires a little more configuration.
Nikodem: In rtorrent the up/down is reversed 300/40 you have set up is actually 300 upload/ 40 download.
I don’t know if anybody cares, but I’ve got rtorrent running on my external harddisk!
It’s a Western Digital My Book world edition, and now it works fine as a download machine!
It’s an ARM-processor (apparently 50 times slower than a P3) with 32Mb, but rtorrent does a good job!
(Although, I might use ntorrent to connect to it on my Ubuntu desktop machine, because I’m a lazy GUI-man
)
But I’m very happy with the minimal footprint and the great performance of rtorrent!
Like a pro
Hello!
Great turtorial!
I have a problem with rTorrent not seeding, leeching works perfectly fine. Tried to google this for day with no luck
There is no problem with portforwarding because azureus works fine on the same ports as i try to run to run rTorrent.
Do I have to run rTorrent in /home dir ??
Anyone had the same prob? thankful to any suggestions…
Gentoo dist btw
is it possible to put the elf binary and all its dependencies in, say a flash drive. I need a text based portable torrent client for i686 linux platform. please help me if you can.
This is the best rtorrent tutorial I have come across, giving me everything I want, without too many details.
I just have one small problem.
I set rtorrent to use torrent files automatically from one folder, and use a default location to download. However, once the download occurs, I want to categorize it in separate folders (Music,Movies.etc). If I do this, I have to stop seeding the file, and delete the torrent, else rtorrent will download it all over again. So how do I change the download folder of a currently downloading file?
I tried Ctrl-D which stops the download, but the torrent status is [OPEN]Inactive. If you do Ctrl-O, it says changing path of Open file.
Any suggestions?
This is just totally awesome. Where you say “(In my experience, rtorrent never deletes the product files it has already created. So if you start downloading and change your mind an hour later, rtorrent might take the torrent out of the list, but the target files are still available. Conceivably, you could change your mind again and re-download the torrent file, and rtorrent would pick up the already downloaded fraction and get back to work on it. But I’m not 100 percent sure on that because I don’t recall ever doing it, so don’t hold me to that.
)” I can attest that it will resume. I started a download on one machine and decided to move my entire rtorrent setup to my server. I just copied over the files my main machine had downloaded and transfered over the .torrent file… It picked up where it left off after a quick hash check.
Although I too deleted a file but it still shows [OPEN]. Any ideas?
If anyone is interested in the general weeknesses of the bittorrent protocol and want to see the proof by modifing rtorrent, checkout the detailed study at http://calomel.org/rtorrent_mods.html
We cover ratios, client ids, and connection timings to name a few.
vedang: Try Ctrl+K, it changes a torrent state to [CLOSED].
To all of you, who are desperate to make torrents stop once they have completed downloading + move the files automatically — this is where you look: http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/wiki/RTorrentCommonTasks
A couple of questions for all Debian-NSLU2-torrenters (well, and others too):
1. The hashing is terribly slow, and it happens *every* time you start rtorrent, even if you have your session saved, and ended the program correctly. Is there a way to speed/skip hashing?
There are these advanced settings like hash_read_ahead etc. I`m just a bit afraid to use them blindly for that might cause memory/processor stress…
2. How does rtorrent consume RAM? It looks like NSLU2 runs out of memory every… like 24-26 hours and kills the screen and rtorrent processes. What can be done to prevent this behavior?
The above two problems currently result in terrible performance, because ¹as rtorrent is started it begins hashing for hours, then eventually uses up all RAM, gets killed, goto¹.
Thanks in advance for all the answers, and many thanks for this great article!
the2ndHare : I run it with slugos and nlsu2, not died yet..
Thanks for this guide =)
the2ndHare:
I had the same problem as you with rTorrent crashing (”HandshakeManager::receive_succeeded(…)” error), with Debian Testing (Lenny). rTorrent was running fine in Debian Stable (etch), but it was a very old version.
I search around google and rTorrent website, seems like this is a known problem:
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ticket/840
http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ticket/841
Most websites suggest compiling your own, with the correct boot flag. At the end of Ticket #841, someone posted a website of compiled version of rTorrent. I have been using that and have no problem so far.
Some ISPs limit the BitTorrent stream with traffic shaping.
To workaround such devil limitation on ISPs, ask rtorrent to try encrypted connections. I have this in my ~/.rtorren.rc:
encryption=allow_incoming,try_outgoing,enable_retry
Even if you ISP does not implement traffic shaping, please crypt-enable your BT client so your connection with those who are shaped may be faster.
rTorrent simply rocks. Started to use it today and it is everything I need.
Very nice program, easy to use…. but my downloads seem to be capped at 50 kbps. I can get 250 kbps on one torrent in windows (utorrent), but if I download the same one on Linux/rtorrent, it never gets higher than 50-52 kbps. What am I doing wrong? My upload is fully utilizing available bandwidth. uploading at app. 100.
Seems to me to be some sort of capping on uploads in rtorrent, yet I can’t find any tweak for that…
Thanks for the tutorial. I am also up and running with rtorrent.
Does anyone know if I can copy a download when it reaches 100% but still share until a ratio is met. All the info I’ve seen will move a torrent when finished (ratio met), but doesn’t seem to have any way to act when the download has completed (100% downloaded).
I am a bittorrent idiot, I confess. new kid on the block. I picked rtorrent because it was cmd line/curses and looked functional.
I have so far been able to download only files of the expected size completely filled with NULL. at first I thought “wow that was fast!!!” but then realised what I actually had was Nuttin. is this normal behaviour for rtorrent, to precreate the right size file filled with NULL?
Yes, it allocates the space to the file before it starts piecing it together. Wait for the file to complete downloading before you start playing with it.
Recent version of rtorrent have a “session = /dir” parameter. If you use it, once a hash is fully performed it will write some data to the session dir which will allow it to skip hashing the same pieces next time.
Crashing, especially on devices with small amounts of RAM, can be related to RAM running out. rtorrent seems to use a lot extra memory during hashes, especially on large torrents. On Linux-enabled routers that are capable of adding extra storage via USB (rack HDD, flash stick) make sure you create and enable a swap partition of at least 64-128 MB (I have 512 MB, just in case). It may help fix this problem.
rtorrent is great. I tried the various webui’s but have finally just settled on using the client itself through ssh/screen.
I have one problem with the watch folder. When I stop a torrent in rtorrent (^d). it is immediately reactivated becuase its .torrent file is still in the watch folder. Is there a solution to this?
Also, I would like rtorrent to stop deleting files from my watch folder when I remove them from rtorrent. Why can’t it just move them, or rename them .removed?
I cannot figure out how to use view_add, which I assume would add some organizational functionality, labeling and sorting torrents.
It would be nice, when using the “move completed torrents to a new location” scheme, if rTorrent could first hash check the FINAL destination, in case you just want to seed something you already have.
Lastly, how about appending “.incomplete” to files that are incomplete, instead of moving them at the end? uTorrent has this feature.
I used btdowloandmanycurses for a long time via screen, which is what I guess you do to check the status of your torrents. It worked well but was too difficult for my SO to handle easily (and she’s pretty bright).
Eventually, I moved to Torrentflux (a web app) on a headless server. I wrote up a howto at http://ibeentoubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/11/setting-up-dedicated-torrent-server.html
For the lazy ones, there’s even a NAS which comes with a BT client pre-installed.
http://ibeentoubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/12/too-lazy-to-build-your-own-filetorrent.html
Thanks for this! Excellent introduction to the best c-l torrent client out there… IMHO…
“”"Your other machine is the lowly 166Mhz Pentium laptop. The one with 64Mb of PC66 and a 3Gb hard drive. The one you got from work in 1997 and never took back, even when you left them for another company during the dot-com boom. Burnt-out pixels, loose hinges and one scratchy speaker. The one with the Stone Temple Pilots sticker peeling off the lid. You know what I’m talking about. “”"
Ha Ha Ha, that got a giggle out of me. There must be a lot of old stolen laptops around like this.
By the way, great guide on what to do with old hardware.
Thanks
Great stuff, did get me going after a couple of minutes. Thanks. Does anyone know a good RSS script to autodownload torrents when they come available to automate this even further
how do you compile the latest stable release for gutsy?
Is it in some way possible to move the finished “files” automaticly to an onther location?
Hi,
Just instaled
I dont understand because when i close the windows and reopen termainal i lose all the torrents in there. dose it not save?
MacTwister: did you create a session directory?
Hey,
if rtorrent is so good, someone please tell me how I can set upload limit for each torrent. I’m not talking about the throttle can be set with asd/ASD zxc/ZXC, but to be able to adjust the limits of each torrent, like
1st torrent - upload: 5K/s, download 10K/s
2nd torrent - upload: 10K/s, download 15K/s
3rd torrent - upload: off, download 20K/s
Thanks in advance
you can’t imagine why anyone would use anything else? how about queueing without annoying scripts? how about labels? meh
How about telling me how to do that?
i use screen to view rtorrent. is there a way to keep rtorrent running without actually having screen open in the terminal?
@mike: Use the “screen” utility. On Debian, install with “apt-get install screen”. See e.g. http://calomel.org/rtorrent_mods.html (”Increasing rtorrent’s ease of use” about halfway down).
Hi all. I know only the very basics of bash (i.e. I am hopeless at writing ANY scripts). Currently I am using this:
1. I put my .torrent files in “torrents/”.
2. find ./torrents -name “*.torrent” | \
while read i ; do cp “$i” watch && sleep 12h && date ; done
(Torrent files will be copied from “torrents/” to “watch/” at intervals of 12 hours. “date” displays the time of day so you can keep track.)
3. Edit the default “.rtorrent.rc” file.
Look for these 2 lines:
#schedule = watch_directory,5,5,load_start=./watch/*.torrent
#schedule = untied_directory,5,5,stop_untied=
Change to:
schedule = watch_directory,60,60,load_start=./watch/*.torrent
schedule = untied_directory,60,60,stop_untied=./watch/*.torrent
(The numbers are in seconds.
60 secs should be frequent enough?)
(”watch_directory” and “load_start” are self-explanatory.
“untied_directory” and “stop_untied”: stop a torrent if its torrent file is deleted [untied].)
Lastly, look for this line:
#schedule = ratio,60,60,stop_on_ratio=200,200M,2000
Change to:
schedule = ratio,60,60,stop_on_ratio=100
(Stop at the minimum 1:1 ratio. Can be increased if you want to be generous.)
Dear all,
The above command,
(quote)
find ./torrents -name “*.torrent” | \
while read i ; do cp “$i” watch && sleep 12h && date ; done
(endquote)
does not add .torrent files in order of name, but in order of file creation time.
To sort all .torrent files in “torrents/” by name and add them to the ‘queue’ in that order, please change the command to:
find ./torrents -name “*.torrent” | sort | \
while read i ; do cp “$i” watch && sleep 12h && date ; done
Sorry for the mistake.
Hi:
Would like to point out a mistake in anonymous_coward’s post above.
The command
find ./torrents -name “*.torrent” | sort | \
while read i ; do cp “$i” watch && sleep 12h && date ; done
should be instead
find ./torrents -name “*.torrent” | sort | \
while read i ; do cp “$i” watch && date && sleep 12h ; done
(”date” and “sleep” are in the wrong order! =p)
Just fixing pacmon’s post:
To download only selected files from within a torrent:
- select the torrent on the main screen then right arrow,
- down arrow to ‘file list’ option, then right arrow
- select each file and toggle the priority with the space bar -> ‘off’,’hig’ (high),” (normal)
- set the files you don’t want to be ‘off’
The asterisk key (*) changes priority for all files.
Please post some information on using the xmlrpc interface.
I would like to use it to control the upload/download throttling by other programs, eg: crontab, website, etc.
I know about the schedule commands in the rc file, but I would like to throttle the speeds based on the day of the week, and currently its not possible without xmlrpc.
Also, is it possible to use it without depending on a webserver?
I use it with my linksys nslu2 nas device that is flashed with native debian eth and runs it smoothly with one 200gb external disk..!! i just love it!
hii everyone i need a help about rtorrent i have installed it in fedora8 by using “yum isntall rtorrent” but when i run rtorrent it shows Could not read resource file: ~/.rtorrent.rc what might be the problem could anyone help me in this please…. this is my mail id donjackson.nambi@gmail.com help needed please
waiting for ur reply
not much to say, but
YOUR THE BOSS!!!
great stuff man
i’m also having the same problem on my gentoo box as nikzon. i can leech the torrent with no problems but as soon as the torrent finishes downloading, it does not seed. i’ve googled this for days and still no results. can anyone help me out on this? i will post any information that you need to take a look into this. thank you!
btw, here’s my email address if anyone can contact me to help…
jestergod@digital-dreamer.org
once again, how to add additional tracker per torrent ?
thanks.
I got a problem and i cant find the solution.
What ever torrent i try to load i got the same message…
Hashing: Storage error: [Hash checker was unable to map chunk: Not a directory]
Is there a way to fix my problem???
Please help