I was just reflecting on my rtorrent slave setup, and thinking how convenient it is to be able to just drop a torrent file in a networked folder, and have an entirely different machine do the dirty work. And of course, it’s even better now that Crux is on that machine, and the network speeds are sky-high.
It’s too bad I can’t do the same trick with a standard http download link, and run something like a console download manager on the same machine. If I could paste a download link into a text file, save it in a watched directory and have another program download it for me … that would be cool.
Funny thing though, I’ve not heard of anything console-based that will do that. I remember a GTK2 download manager somewhere on gtk-apps.org, but I don’t think it really did that. And I’d prefer something console-driven … just because.
I suppose I could jury-rig something with cron and wget (or even axel), and it wouldn’t require too much effort or know-how. But that seems like using a brick to iron a shirt. Rather brutish, really.
If anyone knows of an application that might do something like that — in other words, something that might watch a directory and parse and download links dropped there — I’d be obliged. 🙂
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Seems like a pretty simple script could accomplish the task. Wget is a built in app for downloading things, why not use it?
Any program you would find is probably using wget anyway :P.
Geez that was fast. Were you hovering on the page, waiting for me to press the “submit” button? 😉
Nope, you just so happened to post just before I had class.
Ah, okay. I was a little nervous for a second. 😯 🙂 But yes, it seems like a script or a cron job would do the trick, if properly designed.
You could try fsniper. It watches the given folder and performs actions based on given text file configuration. I think a simple wrapper around wget and cat or something will do. I use it together with firefox download directory for example. Any torrent files land automaticaly in my rtorrent watch directory, openbox/gtk themes unpack to ~/.themes and so on. Oh and of course fsniper is a daemon w/ textfile config
great blog by the way. I learn a lot from you (I think it is the first time since I started reading ~6month ago, when I think I have something useful to mention :P)
Yeah fsniper is cool.
i was about to mention fsniper (i wrote a large portion of it), but it appears popularity is spreading 🙂
I used to have RTorrent working on a remote machine, with a watch folder on that machine. I used to scp files over to it, and they were automatically added. I created a script which when given a torrent file as an argument would send it over and delete it on the local machine.
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