Is there any tool to simply grab the list of peers from a torrent swarm?

**malevil22** · 14.02.24, 10:29

Title. What I want is open a torrent, not download anything, grab the list of peers given and put it in a txt file and exit. Is there any tool or any CLI way of doing this (on Windows)? I've tried searching (and tried aria2c) but haven't found anything that does what I want. You guys might know. Thanks in advance.

**anon** · 15.02.24, 02:44

This feature was suggested for ratio-spoof, but never implemented. The old RM 1.9.2 supports it, but it's a GUI application and therefore hardly scriptable. The MediaDefender leak includes a "BTIPGatherer" tool, but at that point it's easier to write your own rather than trying to compile 2005-era code with missing dependencies (the protocol specification and BEP for UDP trackers are both in the public domain).

Additionally, most regular torrent clients support verbose logging to a file.

**sigduwksnsksis9283** · 15.02.24, 08:39

like anon suggested either use the peer logs like https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBitt...)#get-peer-log or just craft your own solution with libtorrent to get all the connected peers and then store t hem. It sounds like you're interested in all peers in the swarm. You are not very likely to find every peer. Peers may not announce to the same trackers, and find each other via PEX or DHT. Many peers are not connectable, and the only way to find them is to have them find you, which they may not be interested in. i would assume there might be get all peers option but you are going to have to go through their docs.

**anon** · 15.02.24, 11:31

Originally Posted by sigduwksnsksis9283

Peers may not announce to the same trackers, and find each other via PEX or DHT. Many peers are not connectable, and the only way to find them is to have them find you, which they may not be interested in.

All true, and now that you mention it, there are a few other things to watch out for:

Many "peers" on DHT are actually crawling bots from search engines.
Some public trackers add fake, randomly-generated peers to responses as a token measure against copyright agencies.
BEP-22 is another potential source, although one I'd expect very few ISPs to implement.

How much of a factor all of this is depends on what you're trying to do.