Command Line Bittorrent Clients

[shinta]

What do you guys recommend for linux command line bt clients? I've been using CTorrent with CTCS, which isn't bad, but I'm wondering if there's anything better out there.

I'm currently trying out rtorrent, but installation is kind of a pain with all its dependencies. Like right now it won't build because it needs a newer version of curl, but I'm hesitant to update libcurl because it might break something else on my server, so I'm thinking of installing it with a different prefix and telling rtorrent to look there instead...

Anyway, back to original question... which command line bittorrent clients do you guys like? rtorrent? transmission?

 

[guy]

I've used rtorrent before on a previous headless Fedora box, and I liked it. I had rtorrent set to run on startup and monitor a local folder, which would automatically start the torrent once a new .torrent file was added, and would stop the torrent once it was removed.

Coupled with Samba, I could drag and drop .torrent files into and out of that monitored folder from the comfort of any of my locally networked computers. Or with an FTP server, even remotely manage torrents from anywhere else with an FTP client, without the bulk of web interfaces found on other torrent clients.

The only drag is that rtorrent is more difficult to config, especially for automation tasks. There might be other hurdles to overcome depending on which flavor of linux you're using, and what sorts of dependencies you have to deal with, so it might be more than is worth it. But many people have recommended rtorrent, and I have had a good experience with it.

 

[shinta]

Thanks for the review. Ya, I've heard good things about rtorrent, which is why I wanted to try it out on my centos box (which is basically rhel).

But I'm still having problems installing rtorrent. I don't know if I'm just dumb or what. I got past the curl issue, but then libsigc++ wouldn't build. When I do 'make', it throws a bunch of errors. I suspect it has to do with my g++... I think some paths to includes are wrong or something. I eventually gave up trying to build it, and used yum instead. I was able to run the rtorrent binary, but then none of the interactive keys worked (I couldn't even ctrl-C), so I had to kill it.

I think maybe something is wrong with my ncurses, if none of the keys work. Oh well, I'll take another look at it later when I have more patience.

 

[rikijpn]

source...

It's a pain in the ass for all of us installing from source, don't blaim yourself man^^.
It's better to get a really light/easy to compile one, or better, get it from the repositories.

On Debian besides transmission (which for some reason is popular...) there is a client called aria2 (aria2c). At least aria2c is so small you can compile it rather easily, but having it on the repositories you can just "sudo apt-get install aria2" and run it immediatly^^.
It's great having CLI clients, but they don't do too well with/(downloading) asian languages encoded files/torrent ---at least in my experience----.
Even gnome has its own client now (ktorrent is still more advanced though) if you are OK with GUI clients, I just had no choice><.
Also, clients like "deluge" can be setted to run a web interface too, so you download a torrent in the background (as a "service"), and access or manage your downloads by any computer using a web browser in your LAN.