Automate Torrent Download Using Transmission

A while ago I wrote about swget - A Simple wget Wrapper The methods described don’t work for torrents. Today I had to download a video which was not available through direct download, but I found a few torrents for the same. After fiddling around with the scheduler available in Transmission I found it to be absolutely useless; it doesn’t work!

After a little search on the net, I found a workaround for this too!

1. install transmission-cli -
   $sudo apt-get install transmission-cli

2. add a cron job to start downloading all torrents and set it to start at 2:05AM
   5 2 * * * transmission-remote --torrent all --start

3. add another cron job to stop all downloads at 7:55AM
   55 7 * * * transmission-remote --torrent all --stop

4. put the torrents for download, pause all of them, and go to sleep!

Last step is very important as transmission-remote command works only if the Transmission is already up and running.

That’s all for now. Comments/suggestions are welcome.