The need arises when I’m in the office, working of course, and a movie title suddenly pops in my head and I get eager watching it. So I’d search for torrent for that movie with good remarks, at least watchable quality. Download it then SCP that to my machine at home and start session torrent on CLI. Takes at least a minute of my time to fire it up, but most importantly, it’s finished downloading when I get home. And watch on dinner I guess.

So, if you’re using Ubuntu, transmission is commonly installed there. But we need the transmission-cli package installed, which includes transmission-daemon and transmission-remote for starting CLI torrent session. First fire up the daemon, then use remote to add torrent file, like this one below

marvin@localhost:~/Desktop$ transmission-daemon
marvin@localhost:~/Desktop$ transmission-remote -a Avatar-2009-TELESYNC-XviD-ORC.torrent

If it says The program 'transmission-daemon' is currently not installed, just type the suggested install command. It should be like this

marvin@localhost:~$ sudo apt-get install transmission-cli

Now, if you want to find out download stats just add the -l or --list like the one below, will list all torrents and status.

marvin@localhost:~/Desktop$ transmission-remote -l

Use transmission-remote --help for other options. You can set upload and download limits too.

Here are useful links:

• http://linux.die.net/man/1/transmission-remote
• http://www.transmissionbt.com/

bash – GNU Bourne-Again Shell

biff – Be notified when mail arrives (currently not installed)

cat – Concatenate files and print on the standard output

cd – Change directory

chage – Change user password expiry information

chgrp – Change group ownership

chmod – change file access permissions

chown – change file owner and group

chroot – run command or interactive shell with special root directory

chsh – change login shell

clear – clear the terminal screen

cp – copy files and directoriesman

crontab – maintain crontab files for individual users

cut – remove sections from each line of files

date – print or set the system date and time

dd – convert and copy a file

df – report file system disk space usage

diff – compare files line by line

dig – DNS look up utility

dmesg – print or control the kernel ring buffer

dnsdomainname – show the system DNS domain name

echo – display a line of text

env – run a program in a modified environment

false – do nothing, unsuccessfully

fdisk – partition table manipulator for linux (be careful when you use it)

find – search for files in a directory hierarchy

free – display amount of free and used memory in the system