Automatically starting rtorrent within screen

These days I don’t stay at home often, but I do have an RSS/BitTorrent combo fetching me all kinds of neat stuff for me, so I can have it ready for me on the weekend. I love rtorrent, especially due to the fact that I can run it in screen, ssh home and see how things are doing (or add more torrent to the download). However, sometimes my net connection breaks down, computers gets shut off, or things like that. This week my router broke down, so I can’t even ssh home to manually start up rtorrent. My solution: A small script, which checks whether rtorrent is already running, and if not - runs it in a detached screen session. Run this with your favorite cron software.

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#!/bin/bash
# A simple script to make sure I am running rtorrent in a screen

if ! ps -o uname -C rtorrent | grep -q `whoami`; then
  screen -d -m rtorrent
fi