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I'm interested of converting a .torrent binary file into a magnet file.

What are the possibilities to achieve that in Linux/Unix/OSX?

Sample format:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:adc83b19e793491b1c6ea0fd8b46cd9f32e592fc
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  • 1
    Some online options: 1, 2
    – Karan
    Apr 23, 2015 at 17:38
  • transmission-show might get you the infohash (haven't tried it myself), from that you can trivially construct the magnet
    – the8472
    Apr 30, 2015 at 16:13

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Rather late, but as suggested in the comments, the following produces a magnet link, with no further fiddling necessary:

transmission-show -m yourfiles.torrent

This program is shipped as part of the transmission-cli package on Debian derivatives, and part of the larger Transmission client.

Of course the .torrent file must be created beforehand, but that can also be done with a Transmission command, and it doesn't require a tracker (anymore):

transmission-create yourfiles
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  • is there a way to convert magent url to .torrent file?
    – chovy
    Apr 15, 2020 at 5:16
  • Converting a magnet link to a .torrent file would require internet access and would not be guaranteed to work. Converting a .torrent file into a magnet link is a many-to-one mapping (there are infinity many potential .torrent files that would map to the same magnet link — though fortunately "real-world" collisions are extremely rare), so the reverse operation would only work when you have access to somebody who has the original .torrent file (e.g. a torrent tracker or a "peer"). In any case, this should be a separate question.
    – aplaice
    Apr 16, 2020 at 9:17
  • @chovy: There is no way to convert a magnet url to a torrent file,because the magnet link is based on a hash of the torrent file.Since hashing is a one-way function, you cannot do it in reverse. This becomes obvious if you think about large files, like Linux CD images. If you could recreate the CD image from the md5sum, then the compression would be so enormous that you could store the entire WWW on a single harddisk.
    – Jo-Erlend Schinstad
    Oct 2, 2021 at 8:40
  • @Jo-Erlend Schinstad You're obviously correct that recovering the original file from a hash is impossible (without additional information). However, in practice, converting a magnet link into a torrent file is very much possible since the space of original files is finite and much of it is available online (on torrent trackers etc.). All torrent clients that process magnet links are in effect carrying out this conversion! CLI-wise, I've found this abandoned tool that carries out the conversion.
    – aplaice
    Oct 6, 2021 at 21:46

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