Changing announce URLs

Many solutions will have you use sed or some other core Linux utility to do a find and replace. While this usually works, it can very easily cause corruption.

Using chtor

This method requires rTorrent to be shut down first, but completely removes the old announce:

# Shut down rTorrent
# Backing up the session directory is recommended: tar czvf rtorrent-session-$(date -Imin).tar.gz "$(rtxmlrpc session.path)"
cd "$(rtxmlrpc session.path)"
chtor --reannounce "https://example.com/announce/new" *.torrent --dry-run --diff # Dry-run the changes
chtor --reannounce "https://example.com/announce/new" *.torrent                  # Run for real
lstor  __hash__,announce *.torrent | grep example.com                            # Confirm the new URL is in place
# Start up rTorrent

Note

By default, --reannounce will only change the torrent file if the current announce's domain or alias matches the new one. If you use --reannounce-all to change all torrents, it will also change the info.x_cross_seed key, unless --no-cross-seed is also provided

Using rtcontrol

The advantage of this method is that it doesn't require a restart of rTorrent, but instead disables the old trackers and inserts the new URL directly into the item:

rtcontrol "tracker=http://example.com/announce/old" \
  --exec 't.multicall=0,t.disable= ; d.tracker.insert=0,"https://example.com/announce/new" ; d.save_full_session='
rtcontrol "tracker=https://example.com/announce/new" # View torrents with the new announce