A .torrent file is a binary file. Once you download such a file to your system, how do you know from which tracker it is announced, or which files it will download? How about validating the .torrent file or checking how many are downloading the torrent?The cmdline utility dumptorrent might come in handy.

Features

Brief, verbose and raw modes for checking information

Shows size, file names, announce[-list], comment, publisher and info_hash among other info

Get downloader count from the tracker

Installation

You need to compile and use dumptorrent from source on Ubuntu. Download the package from the project homepage on SourceForge and run the following commands:

$ tar -xvf dumptorrent-version.tar.gz $ cd dumptorrent-version $ make

Usage

dumptorrent supports several switches. Use the --help switch to read more.

$ ./dumptorrent --help Usage: ./dumptorrent [-t|-f field|-b|-v|-d|-s] [-w timeout] [-] files.torrent ... ./dumptorrent [-w timeout] -scrape url infohash Options: -t: validate torrent files. only print the invalid files. returns 0 if all files are valid. -f : output a single field. one file a line. empty line on error. handy for scripting. field can be: name, TODO... -b: brief dump -v: full dump -d: raw hierarchical dump -s: show scrape info -w: network timeout -scrape: scrape a hash value aginst a tracker e.g.: ./dumptorrent -scrape http://torrent.linux.duke.edu:6969/announce 61fbd245b29636cfa8c49cb2dabe7262f6db1e66

Most common use case example:

$ ./dumptorrent -v ../ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent ../ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent: Name: ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso Size: 1150844928 (1.07G) Announce: http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce Info Hash: 60827d6691f7cff3a45bc8ea52cc3cb48d3f3034 Piece Length: 524288 (512K) Creation Date: Thu Apr 23 16:20:37 2015 Comment: Ubuntu CD releases.ubuntu.com Files: ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso 1150844928 (1.07G) Announce List: http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce http://ipv6.torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce