My Purpose With This Article:

Learning to use transmission through the command line is more complicated than the gui version but has many nice benefits. For newer users it can be difficult to get transmission-remote up and running. I wanted to create this document to provide additional help and information with easy to understand examples of command usage. I also wanted to help explain the different parts of the program such as the config files, the web interface, and the main cli and how they work together.

To begin start transmission-daemon with the command transmission-daemon or if you would like to autostart the service on boot you can issue the command sudo systemctl enable transmission.service

Note:

Edit configuration files prior to starting the daemon as they will not persist past the session if the daemon is already up. Configs can be found here ~/.config/transmission/settings.json and ~/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json I have also created a symlink between these two files to keep them consistent.

Common commands:

• transis aliased totransmission-cli-remote.`

  Lists all torrents

• transl is aliased to transmission-cli-remote -l

Selects all torrents to perform an operation upon

`trans -tall`

Verifies local data

`trans -t <torrent(s)> --verify`

Asks the tracker for more peers

`trans -t <torrent(s)> --reannounce`

Adds a torrent to client to download

`trans -a <magnet link> | <*.torrent>`

Start given torrents

`trans  -t <torrent(s)>  -s`

Stop(pause) given torrents

`trans  -t <torrent(s)> -S`

Remove and delete torrent and data

`trans  -t <torrent(s)> -rad`

Remove torrent file but preserve data

`trans  -t <torrent(s)> -r`

Obtain a list of all files within a torrent

`trans  -t <torrent(s)> -f`

Marks files 1-3 for download

`trans -t <torrent> -g1,2,3`

Gives information about torrent

`trans  -t <torrent>  -i`    

Moves torrent to the given path

`trans -t <torrent(s)> -m <path>`    

Misc tidbits

Go to http://localhost:9091/transmission/web/ to use the web interface. From the web-interface you can accomplish most of these tasks as well as have a nice visual on all of your torrents.

To run a script upon torrent finish, in the configuration there is an option(script-torrent-done-enabled). To use this feature make sure it is set to true and provide the path to a script in the option below(script-torrent-done-filename). Below is a simple script created by Luke Smith that I use to notify me when a download is done.

#!/bin/bash
notify-send " ✔  Transmission-daemon" "$TR_TORRENT_NAME has completely downloaded."
echo "$TR_TORRENT_NAME has finished downloading!"

By Gianni Young, September 2020