I needed to download a bunch of torrents at one time but I didn’t want them to go to the same default dir as all my other downloads. So I used this line in my .rtorrent.rc file to set my watch dir and then the download dir for those torrents.
NOTE: ~/files is my default dir. In this case I made a dir called ubuntu and want anything I put into the ~/watch dir to be downloaded to ~files/ubuntu

<pre class="wp-code-highlight prettyprint">schedule = watch_directory,5,5,"load_start=~/watch/*.torrent,d.set_directory=~/files/ubuntu/"</pre><p></p>

To load this command in rtorrent without restarting it do a Ctrl-X then type: import=~/.rtorrent.rc

**To use multiple watch directories, just change the watch_directory directive to watch_directory_2, watch_directory_3, etc. for each watch directory you add.

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.