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Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:14:55 +0200
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
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Subject: command-line bittorrent utility
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I am looking for a command-line utility that can fetch via bittorrent that

a) doesn't use curses.  It must be usable in a script and without a tty!

b) doesn't use X11.  Must be a command-line utility!

c) Must be able to inform the script when the transfer is complete.  A 
callback mechanism of some kind is fine as long as it doesn't require 
polling.

This is for distribution of files within a LAN and WAN: I have some 
large files that I need to distribute to many machines, and pushing them 
all out multiple times from the server is inefficient.

Things that come close:

* The python implementation, but it doesn't seem to work very reliably. 
  I get errors and exceptions from both the client and server when 
transferring a file with only two machines participating.

* http://www.murmeldjur.se/btpd/ is a daemon with command line client. 
It doesn't provide for c), and it also doesn't work reliably.

* Not much else.

Surely I am not the first person to want to use bittorrent in a script?

Kris