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 "http://example.com/announce/new" *.torrent
# Start up rTorrent

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,"http://example.com/announce/new" ; d.save_full_session='