A long time ago, tools like mktorrent were the “in” thing.

kmandla@lv-r1fz6: ~$ mktorrent --help
mktorrent 1.0 (c) 2007, 2009 Emil Renner Berthing

Usage: mktorrent [OPTIONS] 

Options:
-a, --announce=[,]* : specify the full announce URLs
                                at least one is required
                                additional -a adds backup trackers
-c, --comment=       : add a comment to the metainfo
-d, --no-date                 : don't write the creation date
-h, --help                    : show this help screen
-l, --piece-length=        : set the piece length to 2^n bytes,
                                default is 18, that is 2^18 = 256kb
-n, --name=             : set the name of the torrent
                                default is the basename of the target
-o, --output=       : set the path and filename of the created file
                                default is .torrent
-p, --private                 : set the private flag
-t, --threads=             : use  threads for calculating hashes
                                default is 2
-v, --verbose                 : be verbose
-w, --web-seed=[,]* : add web seed URLs
                                additional -w adds more URLs

Please send bug reports, patches, feature requests, praise and
general gossip about the program to: esmil@users.sourceforge.net

No, no screenshot this time. Try something different. And save you some bandwidth, since I don’t have anything to show anyhow. 😦

They were the “in” thing, before every torrent client and its grandmother offered to make torrent metainfo files for you, register them with a tracker, upload them, make coffee for you and do your laundry.

Now it just looks quaint, to think you had to include all those extra flags and a tracker and so forth. It’s like a horse and cart. Or a fax machine. Or a CD. 🙄

On the other hand, mktorrent still works (no, I didn’t try it this time, but I did use it last year), and it is a console-only solution to what has otherwise fallen to graphical programs to handle.

And so long as it still works, might as well keep using it. 😉