Torrent

A torrent is a group of P2P clients participating in a coordinated up- and downloading of one or more files. The structure of this torrent group as well as the metadata involved with the torrent is defined by the tracker file.

Clients that want to participate in the torrent connect to the tracker to find out from who to download files. Recent versions of this method also support peer exchange so that clients can communicate to other clients who participates without the need for registering this in the tracker.

Clients

Command-line clients

• RTorrent is a text-based ncurses BitTorrent client written in C++
• www-client/elinks, if built with bittorrent USE flag, has a BitTorrent client add-on
• net-p2p/deluge is a client/server based BitTorrent capable application with both CLI and GUI
• net-p2p/transmission supports both CLI and GUI

Graphical clients

• net-p2p/ktorrent is a KDE based BitTorrent client
• net-p2p/qbittorrent is a Qt based BitTorrent client