It supports all of the most important features to download torrents while also providing seeing features. Transmission-Qt can be configured just as most other torrent clients like the ability to limit upload and download speed, use proxies, set seeding options and configure remote connections.
Downloading files via the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol doesn't have to be the sole realm of graphical user interface programs with excess system resource overhead. If you want to minimize your overhead, or perhaps use the terminal to visually hide the programs you are running, you can install command line tools to do the downing of BitTorrent files for you. Here's how!
Transmission
Transmission is a free and open source software (FOSS) that manages, creates, edits, and downloads BitTorrent files. Transmission uses the command line to manipulate .torrent files but you can optionally install a graphic front end to run the same commands if the terminal is not your thing.
Getting Transmission
Because Transmission is FOSS (free and open-source software) you can get it directly from the maintainers website or if you've read our Brew package manager install guide, you can issue the install command below.
- Open terminal.
- Once you have Brew installed type in brew install transmission.
- Press enter
- Optionally, if you need the GUI, you can install it by typing in brew cask install transmission.
Done.
Sep 11, 2018 The download will complete in the same directory as the.torrent file. More options There are a ton of other options you can look at by issuing the man transmission-daemon command in the terminal to read the documentation. Apr 9, 2016 - Using Transmission, it is now possible for Windows users to download torrent files with much ease. It is safe, fast and easy to use application.
Using Transmission
Once you've downloaded a torrent file, place it into any directory you want. You just need to recall that directory when issuing a new downloaded command.
For example, let's say we put our .torrent file in the Downloads folder.
- Open terminal.
- Change directory to the Downloads folder by issuing cd ~/Downloads/.
- Press enter.
Transmission will automatically start downloading .torrent files in the directory you tell it to. So in my example, my .torrent file is in Downloads.
- Once again in terminal type transmission-daemon --foreground -c ~/Downloads/
- Press enter.
You'll start the transmission service in the foreground, meaning you can watch the program run in the terminal and no other command can be issued in that terminal window. I like doing this so I can monitor in real time what the .torrent download is doing. You can optionally omit the --foreground command and have everything run hidden in the background so no one is the wiser!
The download will complete in the same directory as the .torrent file.
More options
There are a ton of other options you can look at by issuing the man transmission-daemon command in the terminal to read the documentation. On top of that, there are other commands that the install of Transmission provide such as transmission-create to create .torrent files, transmission-show to view .torrent properties, and transmission-edit to edit .torrent files.
Final comments
You'd be hard pressed to need another BitTorrent file downloader other that Transmission once you get a feel for the program's capabilities. Let us know your comments on Transmission or command line tools in general in the comments!
macOS
Main
I have just installed transmission on my server which runs Ubuntu desktop. I have no issue with downloading files and so forth, but would like to keep a terminal window open on my work computer where I can see how far download have come.
Currently I do this with transmission-remote -n 'user:pwd' -l, but this just outputs the current status for the torrents at that given second. I would like a similar list, but one that keeps updating so I don't have to type the above command all the time.
How To Use Torrent Downloads
Anyone know a way to do this? I saw a guy do it with this cmd: transmission-remote-cli.. but i don't have that.. I have transmission-cli but I can't get it to work as the guy with used transmission-remote-cli did.
Hope somebody can help :-)
2 Answers
There is no option to constantly monitor the status of transmission-daemon using transmission-cli, it's just not a tool made for that.
transmission-remote-cli on the other hand works very well for that. Do you have a specific reason to not install it?
You would be able to connect to the daemon simply by running:
Or in case you enabled authentication on the daemon:
Otherwise, yet another option would be connecting to the daemon using the web interface by visiting:
Obviously host and port in the above commands / URL are to be replaced with the host and the port of the server running the daemon.
The watch command can be used to run a program periodically and show the output.
I don't have transmission installed so I can't test this, but something like
should do what you want.
How To Use Transmission To Download Torrents
More information on watch by typing man watch or here