TorrentSniff

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TorrentSniff is a command line Perl program that reads a BitTorrent .torrent file from the local file system or from a URL and reports on the status of the torrent.

TorrentSniff is based on an early version of TorrentSpy. (Version 0.1.0.3-BETA, specifically.) TorrentSpy is much more advanced at this point, but is Microsoft Windows only. For comparing various .torrents to see which is best seeded (that is, which has the most full copies available for download), TorrentSniff is good enough.

TorrentSniff is alpha grade software. That is, it hasn't been tested in a terribly wide variety of circumstances. I trust it, but given that it comes with the traditional NO WARRANTY, I just wanted to give you the heads up.

Comments? Email me.

Want email announcements of new versions? At TorrentSniff's Freshmeat page you can subscribe to new releases.

TorrentSniff is developed on Red Hat 9 and Perl 5.8. It should work on any system with a reasonably recent Perl installation. TorrentSniff requires several Perl modules:

• Digest::SHA1 (Link broken? Try this search.) A copy of Digest::SHA1 built for the above Linux system is included.
• libwww-perl (Link broken? Try this search.)
• URI (Link broken? Try this search.)

Note that some of the newer BitTorrent tracker implementations don't support the information request interface (The "scrape" interface). http://bytemonsoon.com/ (warning, may contain mature content) is one such site. Ideally these newer tracker implementations will add scrape support. I'll look into adding a workaround, but for now TorrentSniff can not report leech and sed statistics on some torrents.

News

Release 0.3.0

• Added caching of server information. Dramatically speeds up multiple queries to the same server. Suggested by Roderick Schertler.
• Autoflushing standard output, error messages should appear near the associated non-error messages. Suggested by Roderick Schertler.

Released 0.2.0.

• Fixes harmless bug that caused "Using a hash as a reference is deprecated" warning messages in newer versions of Perl.
• Improved error messages, especially when a tracker isn't behaving as expected.
• Can now use "-t" to just get information about the tracker (the seed and leech counts), or "-f" to just get information about the torrent (avoiding contacting the tracker).

Release 0.1.0

• Initial release.

Example comparing two possible sources for Red Hat 9 x86 ISO images, Bram's RedHat 9 ISO's and RPMFind's Torrent Resources:

% ./TorrentSniff.pl http://207.44.142.96/redhat9.torrent http://www.rpmfind.net/BitTorrent/shrike-i386-disc1.iso.torrent http://www.rpmfind.net/BitTorrent/shrike-i386-disc2.iso.torrent http://www.rpmfind.net/BitTorrent/shrike-i386-disc3.iso.torrent 
http://207.44.142.96/redhat9.torrent
   info hash:      45e9c61ddc7e41cdeb97c885dc264d34db11181d
   announce url:   http://f.scarywater.net:8080/announce
   full copies:    39 seeds
   partial copies: 83 leeches
             Bytes File
               167 redhat9/MD5SUMS-ftp.md5
       668,991,488 redhat9/shrike-i386-disc1.iso
       677,511,168 redhat9/shrike-i386-disc2.iso
       508,592,128 redhat9/shrike-i386-disc3.iso
     1,855,094,951 TOTAL

http://www.rpmfind.net/BitTorrent/shrike-i386-disc1.iso.torrent
   info hash:      8a4c7a49fe5e8d7777b196b9ac2d8145160d49f5
   announce url:   http://www.rpmfind.net:6969/announce
   full copies:    4 seeds
   partial copies: 8 leeches
             Bytes File
       668,991,488 shrike-i386-disc1.iso

http://www.rpmfind.net/BitTorrent/shrike-i386-disc2.iso.torrent
   info hash:      0b641556a0a8f81b63c3a83d4bf1aeb47293813e
   announce url:   http://www.rpmfind.net:6969/announce
   full copies:    3 seeds
   partial copies: 8 leeches
             Bytes File
       677,511,168 shrike-i386-disc2.iso

http://www.rpmfind.net/BitTorrent/shrike-i386-disc3.iso.torrent
   info hash:      b8d1e315139bdc5c024285aa65efc1170f7535a3
   announce url:   http://www.rpmfind.net:6969/announce
   full copies:    4 seeds
   partial copies: 5 leeches
             Bytes File
       508,592,128 shrike-i386-disc3.iso

% 

Looks like Bram's torrent is much better seeded and will be a better source.

Downloads

• Tarballs:
  • Download TorrentSniff 0.3.0 (5kB)
  • Download TorrentSniff 0.2.0 (5kB)
  • Download TorrentSniff 0.1 (12kB)
• Mandrake Cooker RPM: Built by Götz Waschk it should work with the current Mandrake Cooker or with Mandrake 9.1. I haven't tested this version at all (I'm not a Mandrake user myself), so I can't confirm anything about it. It should be available on any site that mirrors Mandrake's contrib files. Check this list of mirrors and look for the "contrib" directory.

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