Note: If you’re in a real hurry, the link to the cheat sheet is given at the end of the post. Enjoy!
In my quest for that perfect Bit-Torrent client for Linux (read: one that supported scheduling 
), I stumbled upon countless worthless ones. Only one managed to impress me.. and it was NOT uTorrent.
uTorrent (on Wine of course) seemed to fit the bill perfectly – but then scheduled downloads mysteriously failed to complete. Only god knows why. So off I went in search of a better solution..
.. and that’s when I came across rTorrent. I’ve always like CLI solutions to problems (even when that pretty GUI client slaps you in the face and reminds you it’s there) and rTorrent’s minimalistic but powerful features impressed me. It supports scheduling, of course.. (albeit not in as elegant a way as some other solutions) and the learning curve wasn’t too steep either. Besides, it was optimized for high performance and the creator claims a 3x improvement in seeding speeds.. Phew!
In case anyone is interested, the first rTorrent resource to check out is the official website. The man-pages are somewhat outdated (especially some keyboard shortcuts which haven’t been updated in a while). Read the official User Guide here.
Scheduling is accomplished using the schedule = option in the main config file (.rtorrent.rc in your home folder). For BSNL night-birds, the following commands may prove useful (this is what I have in my .rtorrent.rc):
# BSNL Scheduling...
schedule = night_dl,03:00:00,0,download_rate=0
schedule = night_ul,03:00:00,0,upload_rate=48
schedule = peak_dl,08:00:00,0,download_rate=1
schedule = peak_ul,08:00:00,0,upload_rate=2
Just to be clear, download/upload rate of zero turns off throttling, it doesn’t throttle the rate to zero. Also, check out the man-pages for info on the format and the meaning of the various parameters for schedule.
Finishing off, I’d like to add that I’ve made a little “cheat sheet” or quick-ref card for rTorrent . Do check it out and send in suggestions!
rTorrent Quick Reference Card [pdf]
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