Downloading a magnetic link with Powershell 3

Question

I'm new to PowerShell and I'm trying to create a short script that will find magnetic links on a page and download them.

I don't have much of an understanding of how magnetic URIs work and I can't seem to get my script to download files via them.

I am using the following code snippet:

$webclient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$url = "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44bb5e0325b7dad0bdc5abce459b85b014766ec0&dn=MY_TORRENT&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp"

$file = "C:\Some\Path\myfile.torrent"
$webclient.DownloadFile($url, $file)

Which produces the following exception

    System.Management.Automation.MethodInvocationException: Exception calling "DownloadFile" with "2" argument(s): "An exception occurred during a WebClient request." ---> System.Net.We
bException: An exception occurred during a WebClient request. ---> System.NotSupportedException: The URI prefix is not recognized.
   at System.Net.WebRequest.Create(Uri requestUri, Boolean useUriBase)
   at System.Net.WebClient.GetWebRequest(Uri address)
   at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadFile(Uri address, String fileName)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
   at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadFile(Uri address, String fileName)
   at CallSite.Target(Closure , CallSite , Object , Object , Object )
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
   at System.Management.Automation.ExceptionHandlingOps.ConvertToMethodInvocationException(Exception exception, Type typeToThrow, String methodName, Int32 numArgs, MemberInfo member
Info)
   at CallSite.Target(Closure , CallSite , Object , Object , Object )
   at System.Management.Automation.Interpreter.DynamicInstruction`4.Run(InterpretedFrame frame)
   at System.Management.Automation.Interpreter.EnterTryCatchFinallyInstruction.Run(InterpretedFrame frame)

Is there a different way of downloading in PowerShell or is this not possible with a magnetic link.

My ultimate goal is to start downloading a torrent via a magnetic link, so maybe it's possible to just open a torrent client with the link, but I'm not sure how I would do that.

Answer 1

If you have a torrent client like µTorrent installed and it is set to handle magnet links, you can just open the link from Powershell:

start "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44bb5e0325b7dad0bdc5abce459b85b014766ec0&dn=MY_TORRENT&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp"

That should open the torrent client.

You can also use a command line torrent client aria2 and download:

aria2c "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:44bb5e0325b7dad0bdc5abce459b85b014766ec0&dn=MY_TORRENT&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp"