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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

> Pipe dream features

> In-place seeding: identify files on your computer that are part of an indexed torrent, and allow them to be seeded in place after having moved, renamed or deleted parts of the torrent

Does anything do this already? It would be amazing to point a client at a folder of unstructured junk and have it magically find the right parts.

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I wrote a project to do this using libtorrent a while ago, but unfortunately libtorrent crashes when seeding thousands of torrents at once, which is the current blocker. I haven't been working on it since.

https://github.com/chhs1/content-seeder

It might be able to do this with the Bittorent V2 format as the hashes would be per file.

V2 definitely makes it easier, but it's possible to identify files with V1 by iterating through metadata looking for files with the same length as a local file, then checking each piece against the local file. If they all match, then it's the same file. For boundary pieces where it consists of multiple files, I think it's safe enough to ignore if all of the remaining pieces match the local file, but you could do a more complex search looking for sets of files that all have the same length, and then compare the piece hash with the local files.

I would be worried about the implications in terms of security and privacy. Back in the days, other P2P networks allowed to share arbitrary files and it was common for clueless users to just share their entire computer.

I've thought about writing a fuse system that tracks rename / move / delete and updates the torrent client. Never had the time, though.

dc++ does it, but it's not torrent based.

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