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/