The "ezt start" command starts EZtorrent as a background daemon process. ezt reads all defined torrent directories from configdir, updates the .torrent files according to the contents of the corresponding filedir, starts a BitTorrent tracker for each torrent directory, and starts a seeder BitTorrent client process for each .torrent client.
"ezt" by itself starts EZtorrent as a foreground process in the terminal. All messages from ezt will not be sent to syslog, but to the terminal. This is useful for diagnostic purposes.
NOTE: On some systems ezt will not respond to the CTRL-C interrupt from the terminal. Use a different terminal window to find
the ezt process, and send it a SIGINT or SIGTERM (ezt catches the signal and will forward the signal to all BitTorrent child processes it started).
"ezt start", or "ezt" has no effect if ezt is already running. ezt obtains a lock file in configdir, and terminates immediately if the lock file is already held by another ezt process for the same configdir. It's possible to have more than one ezt process running, by using the -c option to give a different configdir to each one (but there's really no good reason to do so, since ezt is perfectly capable of keeping the tabs on multiple torrent directories).
ezt will not become aware of any changes to the contents of all the torrent and file directories until it's restarted. "ezt restart" signals the existing, background ezt process. It checks everything, updates whatever needs to be updated, starts whatever new processes need to be started, and stop whatever processes are no longer needed. Finally, "ezt stop" terminates the existing ezt background daemon process, and all of its children processes.
NOTE: It will take about two minutes for everything to settle down. ezt's initial attempt to start the seeders will probably fail. ezt starts the BitTorrent tracker with the "--allowed_dir" option. At least as of BitTorrent 4.0, its tracker scans for new .torrent files only once a minute. The tracker will refuse the connection attempt from the seeders of freshly-minted .torrent files, because the tracker hasn't refreshed its internal list of allowed .torrents yet.
ezt will log these errors. When a tracker or a seeder process fails, ezt automatically restarts it, after a moderate delay. It may take two or three attempts to start a new seeder. This is normal.
Optional .info files
An optional filename.info file may exist for every filename in filedir. Use any text editor to create this short configuration file. It's a small text configuration file; its initial contents will already be set by ezt. Manual adjustments may be made with any text editor. The following settings may appear in this configuration file. Each setting appears on a separate line:
args=arguments
This setting gives any additional parameters for creating a .torrent for the corresponding file. ezt takes care of the "--target" parameter, and this setting gives any additional parameters. See BitTorrent's documentation for a list of available parameters and options. Example: args=--piece_size_pow2 16
seeder_args=arguments
This setting gives any additional parameters for the seeder process (btdownloadheadless.py). ezt supplies the torrent's name and the file's name (the --save_as parameter). See BitTorrent's documentation for a list of available parameters and options. Example: seeder_args=--max_upload_rate 50 --snub_time 15
03/24/2008
Brendan Gleeson