How to Use BitTorrent to download an ISO image in the command line

How to Use BitTorrent to download an ISO image in the command line

If you want to try the latest version or even the beta version of Linux to satisfy your curiosity and keep it the latest version, you will often encounter troubles when downloading large ISO images. ISO users usually use the. torrent file of ISO images to reduce the bandwidth consumption of servers. P2P download has obvious benefits for users (in terms of download speed), especially when a popular Linux release has a new version released and uploaded for download, when you download the program at the same time.

Ubuntu 14.10 (utopic Unicorn) was just released, so now there should be a lot of seeds on the BitTorrent network to download this version. Although there are many BitTorrent clients based on graphical interfaces, I will show you how to download the ISO image from the BitTorrent client based on the simple command line interface, this is convenient if it is on a remote server without a graphical interface. In another tutorial, I will demonstrate how to verify the integrity of the downloaded ISO image.

The BitTorrent client that I want to use today is transmission-cli. As you may know, Transmission is one of the most popular graphical-based BitTorrent clients. Transmission-cli is its simple command line version.

Install Transmission-cli on Linux

To install transmission-cli, you do not have to install the complete graphic interface-based Transmission. This sounds good.

On Debian, Ubuntu, or their release:

1. $ Sudo apt-get install transmission-cli

On Fedora:

1. $ Sudo yum install transmission-cli

On CentOS or RHEL (after the EPEL repository is installed ):

1. $ Sudo yum install transmission-cli

Use transmission-cli to quickly download an ISO Image

Transmission-cli is easy to use. If you are lazy at learning its command line options, all you need to do is download the. torrent file and run the command. This will automatically find available seeds and download the ISO file from there.

1. $ Wget http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.10/ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent
2. $ Transmission-cli ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

Once the ISO image is downloaded, it is stored in ~ by default ~ /Downloads folder. It took me 5 minutes to download a 1 GB Ubuntu ISO image.

After the program downloads the ISO image, you will see the prompt "status changed from incomplete to complete" on the terminal. Note that transmission-cli will continue to run and can be downloaded by other Downloaders. You can press Ctrl + C to exit.

Custom download options for Reuse

If you often use transmission-cli, it is worth time to familiarize yourself with its command line options.

• The "-w/path/to/download-directory" option specifies the folder to save the downloaded file.

• The "-f/path/to/finish-script" option sets the script to run after the download is complete. Note that transmission-cli continues to run after the file is downloaded by default. If you want to automatically disable transmission-cli after successful download, you can use this option. The following simple script can complete this function.

  1. #! /Bin/sh
  2. Sleep 10
  3. Killall transmission-cli

• If you want to allocate upload/download bandwidth limits for transmission-cli, you can use the "-d <download-speed-in-KB/s>" and "-u <upload-speed-in-KB/s>" options. If you do not want to limit bandwidth usage, just specify the "D" or "-U" option.

There is a more advanced transmission-cli usage example. In this example, the command line Client automatically exits after successful download. The download speed is not limited, but the upload speed is limited to 50 kb/s.

1. $ Transmission-cli-w ~ /Iso-D-u 50-f ~ /Finish. sh ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

Install the BT download software qBittorrent 3.1.9 in Ubuntu 14.04

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